Web Development

Is that the case even when only frame 5 is the dynamic (after the main site is loaded)?
frame areas: 1 2 3
4 5 6
I've been doing a little searching around and it looks like CSS may be a posibility, but I'm open to input from one and all.

PS, site will be tested on every browser I can get my hands on before I upload it.

There has been a move away from frames in recent years. Now whatever method you use, it has to be well designed. But I find a well thought out webpage with a table of contents frame to be one of the most effecient designs.

You only load up the index once.

I am in a rural area with dial up as the only economical option (sat is too expensive) and can get 37.2 kbps on a very good day (usually around 28.8 kbps), and trying to access web pages with several megabytes of fancy java and images is a *******. I especially hate it when the site I HAVE to go to has a set of java scripts that load a fancy banner and a fancy menu on every bloody page because the posterior puncture that wrote the code was either too lazy or too stupid to set it up in frames to only download those few MBs only once. I particularly hate it when you look at the code and see a script that then calls several other scripts - seems they have trouble writting big sections of code properly - and it is the same code on every bloody page. Very inefficient.

you can have a go at organising/modularising your code instead of wodging it all one file and then giving it good stir, which seems to be a standard when I look at some efforts out there.

Frames make your page very difficult to 'read' or even understand the over all message for the visually impaired visitor using screen reader software. Unless your content/messagae is for sighted people only, I'd avoid frames all together.

Butch

With all the great input I've received on this topic, I'm in the process of learning CSS and designing some test pages to get the design I want. Stay tuned...

The combination of CSS and php includes allows your code to be compact and robust. This way, your repetitive code loads only once. There are a lot of good free CSS templates on the web. Pick one, plug in your code, and salt to taste--then you're good to go very quickly. Do yourself a favor--go to w3schools.com and learn the basics. Stay away from wysiwyg editors--they tend to produce a lot of garbage code. Take a look at HTML Kit. It's free and there are a lot of open source plugins to make your job easier.

Test your CSS in several browsers for compatability.
Micro$oft Infernal Exploiter is the worst offender!