Well, if you're comfortable with what you're doing, then power to you, but here's the hierarchy of best practices, in descending order:
1. Drive creation of pages dynamically, using only a single template page (I use the word "template" here differently than you do--I mean a skeleton page with all of the html typed into it, with embedded variables that are replaced at run time). Do a search for "smarty", or "JSP" (shmax.com has a PHP back end, and uses Smarty templates and CSS to layout content). There are a bunch for Ruby now, too. Any time you want to change ALL your pages, you only have to change one file. Typically this involves the use of a database, which is probably a bit out of your depth, but this technique could be adapted to work with a system of text files, or draw info from a spreadsheet.
2. Create hundreds of html pages, but use consistent CSS class tags so that you can affect the layout of everything by editing only your css file. To see the power of CSS, take a look at
http://www.csszengarden.com, and click on some of the different style links. Every page looks radically different even though they all have the same exact content and html markup, and this is achieved solely through CSS manipulation.
3. Create a single html file which has a background, site header, footer, and possible navigation system around the borders of the page, and use an iframe in the center to insert more slimmed-down html pages for each toy into the page, containing only the content unique to that toy (ie. a few photos, some text, etc). This kind of technique isn't very fashionable anymore these days, but at least all your pages would have a unique look that can be easily changed at will, and you still have your hand-coded content. This might be the best approach for you, as it doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge.
4. Create hundreds of hand-coded html pages, with no CSS. No site-wide changes are possible without visiting every page every time. This technique is virtually extinct on the web, now--there isn't a web developer alive that would recommend it. It's just not maintainable. If you had only a dozen pages or so, I would say go for it, but hundreds? As your site grows, so will your headache. Look at a site like tfu.info--you may think you're in good company, as his site is still very popular, but for him a redesign is just not technically feasible. He would have to revisit
thousands of pages to make even a minute change.
Trust me, as long as you're doing a complete re-design, take this opportunity to really reconsider your architecture and try to adopt some modern development techniques. The battle you're currently fighting with all of those custom html pages is ultimately a losing one. It just is.
My advice? If you're serious about running a modern website that can grow and adapt to the constantly changing mess that is the internet, go down to the store and pick up a book on PHP, Ruby, or JSP for yourself, and learn how to create a dynamic website like everybody else. Don't worry, they're designed to be easy--an afternoon with the right book would be enough to get you started. After a few weeks of playing around with whatever you decide to go with, you'll find that you're in a position to do whatever you want with your site, including cool navigation methods, effects, instant layout changes, forums, etc.
Good luck!
I talked to my friend for a while last night about CSS and did some more research. It's a bit late in the game to do it now (like 8 years too far down the road), so I'll just keep doing the individual updates, not a big deal. Once that is done I'll create a template page to make all my other pages from. It's going fast enough 
Also I'll need to eventually get a link to your site on my links page and what not.
At the very least you'd have to go into every page and do the include for the css file, and then you could do sort of generic changes to things like background color, image formatting, etc. But if you want to have finer control over things, you'd need to go in and add classes to the various elements on your pages. That would definitely take a while, but it'd probably be worth it in the long run, as once everything is all properly tagged, you could do all your future changes in one single place: the css file. You don't need me to explain any of this stuff--just do a google search for "css tutorial"--there are thousands of examples online.
