Why Not to Use Frames in Your Website
by Victor H. Schlosser
Over the years, as the Internet has grown and expanded,
website developers have worked very hard to try and
stay just a "little fresher" , or one step
ahead of the competition. Different sizes of text, different
colors of text, graphics, tables, bit maps, animations,
frames, push technology, pull technology, layering,
all of these are a means to an end... To get your page
read!
I'm not going to discuss the others here (I'll save
those for future reports). Today, I would like to talk
to you about frames. I personally like frames if they
are used properly. Some people seem to use them just
because they can. This can make you site harder to navigate
and a whole lot more confusing if not used properly.
Using frames should be like an other type of advertising
or marketing strategy you use for your business, base
the decision on whether or not it will enhance the message
you are trying to get across. But make sure that you
understand the trade-offs that go along with using them.
The biggest trade-off. And probably enough reason by
itself NOT to use frames: Search Engine robots do NOT
read pages with frames! When they encounter a frames
page all they see is they outline of the frames, the
. They don't see any links so they assume it is a dead
page (or a dead site) and they move on. This can be
disastrous for a web-site.
If you want to generate sales, you need customers.
To get customers you first need to get people to your
web-site. To do this, you need the Search Engines. To
go to the time, trouble, and expense of setting up an
Internet Store (web-site) and then to deliberately block
your site from the Search Engines is like opening up
a retail store but painting the windows black and not
putting up a sign. You are open for business, but nobody
knows it, unless they happen to accidently stumble in.
Frames can oftentimes be confusing, especially if all
of them have scrollbars going up/down and left/right.
Besides taking up a lot of your already limited screenspace,
the scrollbars are just distracting. This can cause
a lot of people to leave your site immediately. They
figure that if your front page is confusing (and that
is the page you are using to draw them in) that the
rest of the site probably isn't worth their time or
trouble either.
Navigation. You have to have Everything just right
when you are using frames. If you don't, when you click
on a link it can come up in the wrong window, thus destroying
what was there and probably blowing any and all formatting
that you had done. And, if linked pages come up in the
window where the Links are supposed to be, the person
is trapped on your site, in your frames, with nowhere
to go.
Frames can be useful, but having your main site done
in frames is not wise. Look around at other sites that
have frames, try top navigate them, and try to read
and see everything using all the scroll bars. Then...
think about your average customer. Is this something
you would want to put them through? Is it something
you would want to have to go through if you were the
client?
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Content online. Copyright 1997 by Victor H. Schlosser
