Chapter III - Lesson Two - Frames
"To Frame or Not to Frame?"
Frames can make your website easier to navigate and update when you add more pages after
it has been initially created, but they can also cause some problems and frustration for the
viewer if they are not handled correctly. Most people like frames, but some people do not
like them if the site's author wrote hyperlinks to other websites and do not allow the
viewer to break free of the first site's frame structure. This will sometimes result in a
massive "frames within frames" effect if your links jump to another site that has an
extensive frame structure as well. If you wish to use frames, you should consider the
different options for solving this problem which will be discussed later in this lesson.
If you do not wish to use frames for your site, and you don't want to have navigation
buttons running down the side of your page, there are a couple of options available. Many
sites will have a set of navigation links located either at the top or bottom of each of their
pages in order to maximize the spatial use of each page. Other sites will choose to have an
image map set up as a navigation bar on each page. If you choose to not use frames, then
the best choice aesthetically is to have an image map for navigation, although just having
a string of hyperlinks is easier to do.
