Design advantages

I'm starting to put together a large site I've been designing and I'm trying to decide wether to put together the page mainly useing one index page w/ if statements ie...

..index.php?action=links

to display a links page

or just a
.. links.php
w/ functions to display the graphics that would be on every page of the site.
Or maybe a combination of the 2...

Does one design style have an advantage in load time or anything else?? Any other thoughts on design style??

Well, a index page with everything inclusive will load slower because it takes longer to parse. If your going for performance, then split the scripts up. You can always have one main template and call the files as includes.

Thread moved from 'General Chat' to 'Programming Theory' by Matt.

Reason: Better fit in theory forum.

The "one page to load them all" model also makes URLs more cryptic. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. But it's harder for people to remember or share cryptic URLs and search engines probably won't search your pages.

Yeah thats a good point, I forgot about that. If you want your pages noticed like they should be, all inclusive pages are not the way to go. The web crawler will leave out a lot of the information on your website.