A Good solution will be to add header and footer in Controls and drag and drop your controls in master page this is what i have used
<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Front.master.cs" Inherits="Front" %>
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="asp" %>
<%@ Register Src="Control/Footer.ascx" TagName="Footer" TagPrefix="uc1" %>
<%@ Register Src="Control/LeftSection.ascx" TagName="LeftSection" TagPrefix="uc2" %>
<%@ Register Src="Control/Header.ascx" TagName="Header" TagPrefix="uc3" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head id="Head1" runat="server">
<link href="Styles/StyleSheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="cphHead" runat="server">
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" autocomplete="off" runat="server">
<asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="ToolkitScriptManager1" runat="server">
</asp:ToolkitScriptManager>
<div id="page_wrapper">
<uc3:Header ID="Header1" runat="server" />
<uc2:LeftSection ID="LeftSection1" runat="server" />
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="cphContent" runat="server">
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
<uc1:Footer ID="Footer1" runat="server" />
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>