No, you definitely DON'T want to use frames. Frames were useful long ago
when we were suck with 14.4 and 28.8 dialup modems. They provided a means to
avoid loading the same objects on a page over and over again. They had great
success, but it only lasted a couple years. The problems with frames are
huge, especially if you need your site found on a search engine.
A frame page is made up of two parts.
The main part is the frameset. This defines how the browser is carved up
into individual frames.
The second part is made up of the pages that go into the frames defined in
the frameset.
The real problem stems from linking. How do you link to a page in your
website? Normally, if you wanted to link to the "about us" page you would
normally do
www.mysite.com/aboutus.htm. That doesn't work the same with
frames. Instead of viewing an about us page in a nice pretty frameset with
all the logo and navigation elements, all you see is the actual about us
page that would normally be loaded into the frameset. Since you went
straight to the about us page the frameset has been bypassed and nothing
else was loaded. This basically kills the ability to put a frames-based site
on a search engine and expect results.
Don't worry though, if it's a consistant look and feel your're after you may
be in luck. I forget if this features was introduced in FP 2002 or 2003, but
look for something called Dynamic Web Template (DWTs). A DWT is basically a
master template that you can use to apply a consistent look and feel to all
your pages. You start by creating your look and feel in the DWT and then
defining areas that are editable. When you create a new web page that is
based on a DWT, you'll get all the look and feel items but can only touch
the parts of the page that you marked as editable in the main DWT. To make a
change to all the pages that use the DWT, just make the change in the DWT
and update all the pages and FP will go through, find all the pages that use
the DWT, and make changes to the non-editable HTML portions to make them the
same as the DWT.