Frames are one of those great ideas for conserving bandwidth when the fast
lane was a 28.8 modem, but you've found probably their absolute worst
side-effect. What you might try to do is get the site into shared borders.
That would give you regions similar in concept to a frame. Ie: you have
verious areas of content such as a banner and navigation menu and those
areas are stored in seperated files and applied to pages in the site. That
may be the simplest way to get you up and cooking. Make sure you backup your
site (just do a copy and paste the entire web site directory somewhere else
on your hard drive) just in case as Shared Borders can be tempermental.
Another thing you can look into is DWTs (Dynamic Web Templates). These are
basically template files you create that hold areas of the page that can be
edited when you create a page, but it keeps the actual items in the template
locked (such as a footer that you want on all pages can only be edited in
the actual template file and not when you're editing a normal page). This is
a great way to have all pages with a uniform layout without the worries of
maintaining all the elements. I haven't attempted to apply a template to an
entire site in a long time so I can't say how easay the process is (and I
don't have FP 2003 installed on the machine I'm using right now) but it may
be a good option for the future as MS would like Shared Borders to go away
as they've always had problems.
--
Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Former Microsoft FrontPage MVP 199?-2006
