To Button or Not to Button

I am currently building my own site (MY FIRST ) I'm using frontpage and I'm using frames. But what i was wondering was whether hyperlink buttons take longer to load than normal text hyperlinks??

Is it really worth using buttons??
Is their a load time different when using lots of buttons??
And are frames a good way to build a first time web site?


thanks for any help

[Edited on 1-9-2004 by UK Wizard]

Can you give us the web address of your site ? I would like to see what you mean.

i'm in the process of building it. so its not on the internet yet

i wanted to know if using buttons (to navigate) on a web page greatly increased the load up time at all?

I've solved to the other questions i asked.

sorry if i didn't explain myself very well

It really only depends on the size of the image you want to use as "buttons". Sure, an image will always take a little more time to load than plain text, but hey, who want a website only made of text?
(besides some old school geeks)

i think i'll use buttons
it takes a little longer to load, but it only needs to load once because of the frames

thanks for the opinions

Yes, it depend of the weight of your buttons, of course.

A tip : IF you want your page to load faster, you must have your graphics in the same directory of your .html source page. Don't hesitate to make one directory per page, it really increase the loading time of the graphics.

Also, it depend on the host server speed, but you can't do nothing for that, except try to see some sites based on the server before you take an account to a web-host.

frames used to choke search engines, this might have changed for the major players but it can take years for the minor engines to catch up..

if a site the size of the BBC doesn't use them i can't understand why small sites need them, they slow the browser down and being caught in a frameset is a nightmare

then again, i think that iframes are real handy if you're short on space and can look cool with a CSS scroll bar.. just remember to set the target