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The Ills of Frames

From Carrielyn Louie

At first glance, frames seem harmless. They can look downright impressive -- high-tech, even. What your average Web designer might not know, however, is how much trouble frames can cause, preventing visitors from using your site fully and even from finding your site in the first place.

Frames Prevent Bookmarking

Without getting too technical, let me explain how frames work. All Web sites have what we call an index page. This is usually the first page your visitors see. On a site with frames, this index page is set up to display multiple pages of your site. For example, your index page would have a window that pulls in the navigation and a window that pulls in the pages of your content. Now your visitors can't easily bookmark different pages – every time they try, all they'll end up bookmarking is your index page. This is a problem when you have many products, or a site with many levels. If visitors can't get where they want to go in one or two clicks, they should be able to bookmark specific destinations.

You Can't Easily Print Pages

You never know when someone will want to print part of your site. But with frames, what they'll get is a blank page. There is a way around it – you can right-click in the window of content and select the print option – but it's my opinion that you should never ask a visitor to go through that much effort, or expect them to be Web savvy.

Frames Can Be Turned Off

Visitors have the option of telling their browsers not to interpret framed sites at all, so some people see a whole lot of nothing! There are things you can do to make sure people see something, but it won’t be the site you intended.

Search Engines Don't Do Frames

Search engines need links in order to crawl and index pages. A framed site is like hitting a brick wall: There are no links for the engines to follow. The number and quality of links to your page are part of what garner your site a page rank. If search engines can't crawl your site, you get no page rank and people can't find you.

How To Make Your Site More Attractive to Search Engines

Does your site already use frames? Within the <frameset></fram eset> tags , make sure you can use are using the <noframes></noframes> tags to tell help search engines and visitors who may have frames turned off and the search engines what your site is about. Write a couple of brief, but descriptive , paragraphs about your website/ site or business. These brief paragraphs would also serve well in META tags, which you should also make sure you use on the index page of a framed site. These META tags are really what tell Search Engines what you're about and go a long way in determing how your site will be ranked. For more information on META tags , please head on over to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page for a very an enlightening article.

If you are in the midst of deciding how to structure your site, I hope this article has convinced you to stay away from frames.

If you have a framed site and need help restructuring your site or making it more attractive to search engines, please visit the Contact page and select the Search Engine Optimization box.
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