Part III: Advancing Your Site You can create as many frames as you want within a browser window. Unfortunately, some people overuse them and create designs that are so complex and broken up that theyre neither aesthetically appealing nor easily navigable. Putting too many frames on one page can also make a site hard to read because the individual windows are too small. This has led many Web surfers to passionately hate frames. And some sites that rushed to implement frames when they were first introduced have since either abandoned frames or minimized their use. Heres a list of guidelines to follow when using frames: _ Dont use frames just for the sake of using frames. If you have a compelling reason to use frames, then create an elegant and easy-to-follow frameset. But dont do it just because Dreamweaver makes creating them relatively easy. _ Limit the use of frames and keep files small. Remember that each frame you create represents another HTML file. Thus, a frameset with three frames requires a browser to fetch and display four Web pages, and that may dramatically increase download time. _ Turn off frame borders. Browsers that support frames also support the capability to turn off the border that divides frames in a frameset. If you turn the borders off, your pages look cleaner. Frame borders, shown in Figure 7-1, are thick and an ugly gray in color, and they can break up a nice design. You can change the color in the Properties inspector, but I still recommend that you only use them when you feel that theyre absolutely necessary. I show you how to turn off frame borders in the "Changing Frame Properties" section toward the end of this chapter. _ Dont use frames when you can use CSS or tables instead. Tables are easier to create than frames and provide a more elegant solution to your design needs because theyre less intrusive to the design. I include lots of information on creating tables in Chapter 6, and you find coverage of CSS - an increasingly popular design option - in Chapter 8. _ Dont place frames within frames. The windows get too darned small to be useful for much of anything, and the screen looks horribly complicated. You can also run into problems when your framed site links to another site thats displayed in your frameset. The sidebar "Resist using frames when you link to other peoples Web sites" later in this chapter provides many more reasons to limit using frames inside of frames. _ Put in alternate <NOFRAMES> content. The number of users surfing the Web with browsers that dont support frames becomes smaller every day. Still, showing them something other than a blank page is a good idea. I usually put in a line that says, "This site uses frames and requires a frames-capable browser to view." <NOFRAMES> content can also be read by search engines, which may otherwise fail to catalog the content within framed pages. Chapter 7: Framing Your Pages 181 Understanding How Frames Work Frames are a bit complicated, but Dreamweaver helps make the whole process