- Navigation on a very long page becomes difficult, if not impossible. One of major advantages to splitting up a long document into many smaller pages is control you gain over navigation.

- Other web sites will find it difficult to link to specific content on your page. This is web, and webmasters want to link to pages on a site which pertain to their own content. If you have one long page, you effectively discourage this kind of linking, which means you will get fewer links. No matter what you think about intrasite linking (linking to anything except homepage), majority of webmasters will do so. Your best course of action is to make it easy for them to link to any page on your site (not, of course, directly to graphics, sounds or multimedia - that is bandwidth stealing).

You have to remember when you are creating a web site that's it's a web site. You are not creating a book which goes from front to back - you are creating a web of links from page to page.

The really good webmasters learn how to take supreme advantage of this fact and create web sites that are a dream to navigate. Pages flow from one to other, with links here and there where appropriate. A good webmaster would never (except under some special conditions) create a huge page of text or graphics - that's not way web works.

So what do you do? Take advantage of hyperlinks and split a large document up into as many smaller documents as necessary. Link them together as appropriate. Using this simple technique, you can create documents that are interesting and in which visitors are interested (which is what is important, after all).

To redirect a visitor from an optimized "doorway" page you simply put following script in your section.

and replace index.htm with page you want to redirect visitor to. (script from RB Associates)

The other aspect here is that for search engines which only index your home page, you would need to submit each of your site content pages separately. If one of these content pages is indexed and found in a search, visitor will only see contents page and will not see rest of your site, something you definitely don't want to happen ! This brings us to next and maybe most important disadvantage of using frames.

3)Frames can make it difficult for you to direct people to a particular page on your site. This is especially so if you want to use email to send a visitor to a particular page that has details of an affiliate program for example. If you don't send them to your index.htm page they will not be able to see rest of your site, only contents of page you have directed them to.

4)Frames within frames can be confusing, so you have to pay special attention to your hyperlinks when you are designing your pages. For example if one of links in your main or contents frame redirects a visitor back to index.htm page, result will be a mess unless hyperlink specifies target frame as "top" (eg: ) to prevent index page opening inside contents page.

Learning how to use frames is easy once you have mastered concept that a hyperlink can lead to a page in its own frame (TARGET="_self") default option, or in another frame in frameset eg:(TARGET="main").

Other sources that discuss advantages and disadvantages of frames: RB Assocaites/Web Development http://www.rbdesigns.com/articles/d346.html

All in all, whether you use frames or not is a personal decision, but you need to aware of advantages and disadvantages before you design your site.