What are Frames?

A frame is an HTML page that is composed of several other HTML pages, which are displayed in a single Browser window.
When viewing a browser window that has frames and if these are well structured, you’ll never notice that you are looking at a different HTML page.

The benefits or rather the advantage, I know but one, the use of frames is beneficail when you scroll down in one page (eg the contents page) and the other page (menu page) remains in place.

The two main drawbacks, these are certainly drawbacks of using frames, are:
1. the visitor of your site, can not add a specific page, that which interests him, to his favorites.
2. Search Engines like Google will find these pages, but the problem here again is that these pages are indexed as separate pages and not as a framed page. Which leads to a page without a menu.
And 3. There are a lot more, but too many to mention.

My judgment is, never use frames for the design of your site.
Frames are old and with the techniques that exist since 2009, such as CSS and DIV’s, you no longer need these to modify all your pages quickly, or rather your menu.
But this is a course in Dreamweaver, so I will include it in this course.

Framesets

Dreamweaver comes with a number of framesets. A frameset is a page that consists of several frames. To open it, click the “File” button in the menu bar and select “New”. From the left column “Page from Sample”, choose the “Sample” section for “Framesets”, then in the “Example Page” section, choose from a classification of the different frames.
An example of the selected set is displayed on the right side of the dialog.

 

As an example I choose a frameset that consists of three frames and click the Ok button.

This opens the frameset page and a dialog.
In this dialog, we enter a title for each frame, you do not have to, but you should.
When you’re done, click the OK button.
This closes the dialog.

In the frameset page, we see the three different frames, each of these frame contains an HTML page.
In the “frames” panel, you can see which frame is selected at that time, the Frame name is displayed darker. If this panel is not visible, then click “Window” in the menu bar and choose “frames” in the drop-down menu.

Before you change anything, it is best that you save all the pages first.
When I say ALL pages, I mean all pages.
To do this click the “File” button in the menu bar and select “Save All” in the drop-down menu.
This will be one for all three pages + frameset page to save under a name that you will obviously determine.

As you notice in the picture below, we have four different pages in the “Files” panel.

For formatting these pages, except for the frameset page, you can click the same way as a “normal” page. Moreover, they are “normal” pages.
The formatting, or rather the classification of the frameset page is done by first opening it, then selecting the frameset in the “frames” panel (click the outside edge) and setting the different options for this in the properties window.

Much more than the edges, you can not set the edges between the different frames. You can do this by placing the cursor on the border between two frames and clicking and dragging it until the desired size is reached, or you just enter a value in the “Column”.
In the “Borders” we have the choice between borders or no borders.
If you have chosen borders, you can set the width of this in the “Border Width”.
To add a frame, click the “Frames” button on the “Layout” tab of the “Insert” toolbar.
To remove a frame from the frameset, you first open the “frames” panel.
You place the cursor on the border between two frames and drag it all the way to the edge of your frameset page. A dialogue window will appear asking if you want to save the changes for this frame. Answer no and the frame will be removed.

In the next lesson I will explain how to make links in a frameset, but I feel I have wasted enough time on something that no one going to use.

Featured Courses

• Downloading iPad Apps
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Publisher
• Lesson 65: File Formats