Should I user frames on my site?
 

I am looking to make my site a little better (www.sccollectors.com) Should I use frames on these pages or something else? Thanks

Framed pages are one of the worst things a web designer can do.

Make a php system instead.

do not use frames

N8_115 what exactly is a php system? I would be greatly interested in this. I would like the site to look nice. It would need to be uniform. Otherwise I am open to any suggestions

I'm assuming that your idea behind this is that you want a static header, navigation, and footer that are all located in just one file?

If that's the case, check out http://www.php.net/manual and learn some of the basics ( include(); // require(); functions etc... ).

If you meant something else by that, please explain :)

what are some of the benefits of doing it this way instead of doing it in HTML? I am fimilar with html enough where I could do it through it. How are load times and such also

It could be based off vBulletin (styles, everything). It can get rather tedious editing 100 HTML files where only one change is necessary. You'd also get user permissions, (any vb stuff really). You'd probably want to adapt your forum skin to match your site first though.

Just a possibility!

That sounds pretty cool. So I could get everything to basically match including my forum. Also I believe you mean that I could make people sign in to get content (correct me if I am wrong) That would also be pretty cool. Anyone have a site that is a great example of this? what owuld i need to do this? I know that I would need a webserver. Would I need another mysql database? what tools do you use to create this? Thanks

Well if you have vBulletin already then you have enough, since it just adds more to the vBulletin database. There are some popular scripts like vBadvanced which do this for you, or you can do it yourself. Do a search on "vBadvanced" here or go to vbadvanced.com (i think thats the site).

vbadvanced looks very interesting. I like some of the features it has and the intergration that it has with the forum. Do you have to purchase it or does it come for free? Also is it possible to make the pages look like real pages, not just a changed vb page? I noticed that many o fthe sites did that but I did notice that mustangevolution.com didn't do that. Thanks

Yup, just edit the templates to how you want them. It's free, but there's a better version that costs $ I think..

vbadvanced is free you can download it at thier site if you registered or here on vb.org

The portal is very much html/css driven only its using variables to replace your content dynamically.

how hard is this to get going? Sounds like something that could be great. Thanks

Its takes a few minutes to install literally. Customizing the html... well depends on how good you are and how quick you get used to templates and how they function in relation to the site.