Variable PHP Includes - Is there such a thing?

Suppose you design a standard banner for the top of your web pages and use an include to insert it into every page on your site, like this: <?php include ("../../../../includes/header.php"); ?> But you later decide you'd like to change just one element on each page. For example, you might design a standard image banner, followed by a title and subtitle for each page, but you want to change the title to Alaska, Nebraska or Wyoming on each page. Is there a way to do this with PHP? If it has a name, I can search for information online, but I don't even know what to call it. I've played with something of this nature in Dreamweaver. You can design a template that turns out carbon copies of a page, but single out certain items by enclosing them with @@, which are somehow changed on individual pages, or something like that. I can't remember what it's called at the moment. Another strategy would be to use a PHP include to insert an element on different pages, then modify each element with a unique style sheet on each page. But I just wondered if PHP offers additional possibilities for similar experiments. Thanks.