I remember thinking frames were the best thing for navigation because you only needed to keep the one file updated, I didnt even know about server side includes back then :) css came a few years later too.
To make the long story short, I went to IRC (webmaster.com #ra2 - i think), people there introduced me to SSI. Then a few weeks later, they introduced me to Newspro (a few months/years later, it was renamed to Coranto).
It was a Geocities page and had one of those massive long URL's and may have even used an animated gif or too also!