One of the reasons frames are easy to screw up is that they make your page more complicated as a page — your page, which used to be one object, is now cut up into multiple objects. In order for your site to remain elegant, you must carefully attend to the implications of the division of labor you've instituted between, say, navigation and main content.
You effect that division by defining your page as a frameset and then defining the frames within that frameset. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus in Lesson 4 on creating framesets that contain two frames (a left frame for navigation and a right frame for content, since this adheres to the emerging "de facto" layout standard for the web). You can also define framesets within framesets for more complicated layouts, as I have done for The Ism Book; we'll talk about that towards the end of Lesson 4, but in general I counsel against it.
Go to Framesets and Frames.