A framed template is composed of actually 2 html pages. Have you seen a site where there is a navigation column on the left and there is content on the right side of the page? If the navigation column and the content area have separate scroll bars then it is a framed page. Along with creating a useability issue, i.e. having to scroll down the navigation column to find what you want, then scrolling separately for the content, it also creates a problem for search engines. When a search engine visits a framed page this is what they see:

<frameset cols="80,*">
<frame name="NoName" noresize src="http://www.yoursite.com/nav.html">
<frame name="NoName" noresize src="http://www.yoursite.com/content.html">
</frameset>

http://www.yoursite.com/nav.html pulls the navigation area into the page and http://www.yoursite.com/content.html creates the content of the page. Remember search engines love textual content, so a framed page gets passed by when visited by a search engine.

Now there are certain times when a framed page must be used. The best example of this for Realtors is when you are publishing IDX content on your site. In that example you must use a frame, because it is the only way you can have that content on your site.