creating flat versions of php pages

hi guys we have 2 very high traffic sites and we need to be able to make these pages load faster , we are coming up with a solution to make flat file versions of the sites in the short term before we start using caching technologhies is this the right way to go about this ? also whats is the best way to parse a php page ie foo.php?id=1, foo.php?id=2 with the contents of each story to a file and update all the links. maybe with naming conventions like foo/1.html, foo/2.html in a mod rewrite style