You can design/develop your pages/templates however you wish, keep that in mind.
A more common approach assuming you have the same overall look and feel (header, nav, footer) on all the pages would be to create one master page at the root of the site and use
visual inheritance on the rest of the page templates. This way all your pages (about, contact, locations, etc) will reflect changes to the nav, header, footer, etc when you make them in one place.
Regarding overcoming this, I suggest:
- setting your root as a master page
- any other page templates you have marked as master page uncheck and set visual inheritance to root
- review other page templates and inherit parent pages as needed.