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The Pros And Cons Of Using Frames Several years ago most web sites were designed with Frames (a set of individual pages displayed on screen simultaneously but appearing as only one page). A typical use of frames by a web page designer is to include the left-side navigation-bar in one frame and the main page in another. From the standpoint of designing and maintaining a web site, HTML frames seem wonderful, frames were once very popular as a means to improve site navigation. However, due to public opinion, search engine issues, and new design techniques frames have increasingly become very unfashionable. Just because your web page designer likes frames does not mean that you should as well. Frames can create serious problems for site visitors. The main disadvantages are that not all search engines support frames, they can cause problems for your visitors to bookmark or print individual pages, and badly designed framesets can greatly reduce the viewable area on smaller screens. Frames and search engines are not the best of partners, some engines won't spider past your first page while others index individual frames leaving visitors stranded without a navigation frame, keeping visitors from browsing the rest of your site. Most search engine spiders will ignore everything except what's contained within the <noframes> tag. Frames prevent visitors from bookmarking internal pages. This stops potential customers from coming back to your site and easily returning to the page they were looking for. Frames make printing a page more difficult, particularly for older browsers, and inexperienced computer users. Ok, so I have given frames a bashing, and advise you don't use them, unless absolutely necessary. However, sometimes frames are appropriate, and if used very carefully can enhance the visitors experience. E-commerce web sites almost demand the use of frames. Product pages are often created dynamically, generated by information gathered from a database, using either CGI or ASP technology. To create thousands of static product pages would be very time consuming and hence expensive, so frames would be appropriate in this case. If you are going to use frames make sure your web page designer creates a "no frames" version of your site, or at the very least, include the <noframes> element within your frameset code (before the first frame tag). You should include a detailed description of the site, a link to a contents page and Meta tags within the <noframes> tags. You should also include a link on every page of your site i.e. <a href= "default.htm" target="_top">home</a> so that if users are being directed to individual pages (pages without the surrounding frameset) they can reload the frameset. |
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