A framed site very often makes for an easily updated Web site, and many designers opt to use frames for this reason. They are especially useful for maintaining very large sites. Personally, I find framed sites that utilize scroll bars to be fairly ugly and outdated-looking. But I've also seen creative uses of the frame design, with no scroll bars, that look very professional and Internet-savvy.

You can usually tell that a site is "framed" when the left-hand navigation bar stays still while the information in the center of the page scrolls. Alternatively, there might be a logo or some navigation at the top that stays still while the rest of the page scrolls. Most of what you read about search engine optimization says that using frames on your site is basically a death sentence because the search engines simply cannot navigate the frames, and therefore your site will not get indexed properly. This is both true and false. It's true if frames are used improperly, false if they are used correctly.