To Frame or not to Frame?

Hi all,

I'm building a website for a fantasy football league I'm starting up. Just a simple design opinion question here.

So far all I've got is the header, take a looksee.

From there, I'm going to put another little navigation bar down the left side of the page with some more links, and then the main content in the main window (below the header and to the right of the other navigation bar). Pretty standard layout.

My question is simply whether you all think I should use frames or not. With the frames, I'd have a frame at the top for the header, a frame on the left for the other navigation pane, and then a frame in the middle for the content. It would make the transition from page to page a little cleaner, and also allow me to use the forums with the header/navigation pane still available to the user.

However, I've heard many bad things about frames. Would I be better off just creating a function to call the header and navigation pane and including them on each page?

Thanks in advance.

If your creating a fantasy football league, most likely you will want to be found in search engines. Frames and search engines dislike one another.

IMHO you should if you have server side support include the file that way. That way having a consistent design is much easier.

Another way would be to use javascripts, and have the header and nav bar in .js files.

However, this is a tad dangerous using this for a site layout as a user could not support JavaScript.

Hope this helps

the saying that search engines dislike frames is true, badly made frame sites that is. read this article by Harold Hope.

http://www.sitesled.com/members/devillisin/frames.html

if you use the <noframe> function right, you'll be fine.

theres also a javascript to sort out single page outing from results and theres a way to make them bookmarkable.

I'd recommend using CSS and staying away from frames...

Glish.com has some great CSS layouts.