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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Copyright
1997 by Victor H. Schlosser
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