Re: I need advice on html site layout and coding (frames)
The reason you see nothing right now, is that you neglected the noframes part of the code. Normally that only matters if you are visited by people whose browsers do not display frames. But at a bravenet free site, you need the noframes section with body tags.
Your site is here - or sort of. I see your top frame is still blank, and you haven't gotten around to creating links.html and contents.html yet.
But you will see the main problem:
You can get the frames to display, but at a Bravenet free site, you will have advertising on all pages. And since frames are just different pages displayed together, you will have advertising in all frames.
Scuttermans way works very well on paid hosting, but it will look like this on a free site.
The best solution is to avoid frames altogether. There are far more problems with frames than the ones presented by Bravehost free hosting. Whatever you hope to achieve by using frames can probably be done more easily by other means.
Re: I need advice on html site layout and coding (frames)
If you want to move away from frames there are several alternatives.
The most obvious is to have include the links and header in every page.
This has the advantage that search engines like it, and the disadvantage that any change to the links or the header will have to be changed manually on all pages.
One way I have used in the past is to code the links into a javascript file, then link to the file on every page.
It has the advantage that links only need to be changed in one file, and the same can be done for the header, but the disadvantage that search engines don't follow javascript links, so bad search placement.
A way to lessen this is to manually link to a sitemap on each page, so the search engines can follow the link to the sitemap, then follow the links in the sitemap to other areas, but this won't be completely effective.
If the header and links are going to be staying roughly the same after the development, go for option 1. If they will be changing a lot... I'd say look into php, but that's a bit more advanced.
Re: I need advice on html site layout and coding (frames)
Do you mean tables instead of frames? You could do that, but you get more flexibility and control using divs. Very simple example: http://scutterman.com/Bravenet/iframes/example_divs.html.
If you use css to style the divs you can get the layout to look almost any way you want it to, and once you get the hang of it, designing sites takes a lot less work.
