Frames, you see them all over the internet. They can either make a site look professional and cause it to be easily navigated, or they can drive the visitor nuts. Many considerate site owners add a frames option and a no frames option for viewers visiting their site. Before adding frames to your homepage think about what purpose will be served by using frames.

One of the best uses of a frame is to add navigation, a menu bar that stays with the visitor while they visit your site. They can open the pages they would like to see and continue to have the menu bar at their disposal. Using frames is basically having two or more pages visible to the visitor at one time.

A negative side to using frames is that it decreases the amount of a page that can be viewed at once, because you are using a portion of the screen space for another frame. People can become very irritated when they try to leave your site but can not leave your frame. This does not encourage return visits. Another draw back is that the viewer can not see the actual URL they are on. It will always show the index page URL. There are a few ways around this. First you can right click on the page in Netscape or IE and select "Open Frame in new Window" or just select "View Frame Info" (in Netscape) or "Properties" (in IE) to find the actual name of the URL. Viewers can also get caught in your frame after leaving your page. More on how to handle this later.

Now on with the lesson. First off, remember that using frames is simply showing two or more HTML pages at the same time. These  pages are joined by what is called a "FRAMESET DOCUMENT". This document usually contains no content of its own, it exists to join the other html files and to tell the browser how to display these files.

Here is a sample frameset document: