Quote:
Originally posted by JayC
It's actually more than a personal thing, there are concrete disadvantages to using frames.
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Lets get this straight, I agree that yes there are some disadvantages to using frames, predominantly 2 main ones;
1. Search Engine spidering. As stated by JayC, search engine (although not all) which spider your pages will follow the frm src commands in your frameset and list the pages. Visitors arriving will have no obvious way of navigating your site since in most cases frameset sites neglect to include a basic home link. And JayC is also correct in stating that the frameset page wwill be listed with the "Your Browser doesn't support frames...." text which is stripped from the <noframes> section of your frameset page.
2. Older browsers cannot handle frames at all, and even some recent versions of WebTV cannot cope with them either.
BUT there are equally some advantages. A frameset allows easier navigation for a visitor arriving at the front door of your site, since the nav controls remain visible at all times. You can over come problem #1 by including a line such as;
"If you arrived here by means of a search engine and there is no menu or banner visible, please access our fully indexed homepage here", and place an anchor (href) onto the txt which links your homepage frameset with target="_top" set so it clears full screen and loads the frameset as it is intended to be viewed. If you are using Frontpage, and I notice that you site is built using it, although I don't know if it will be hosted on a FP Ext server, this would be easily achieved using the common borders, which will add the line to the foot of every page in your site. Hey simple, problem #1 solved!
Usage of non frames capable browsers now is miniscule.
But you still need to ensure that you place a dummy page into the <noframes> section of your frameset such that search engines can use the dummy to index you fully.
As for professional designers looking down on you, don't worry about it mate! To be entirely honest I often see better efforts from amateurs than a large proportion of so called professional web designers come up with!
One fact does remain though. In the instance of this site, it is unlikely that the use of a frameset is really relevant! For a site which is only likely to have a small number of pages, you are probably better to stick to noframes, but use ssi or the FP include page BOT to make editing your menu easy.
As for a couple of negatives about your site;
lose the dhtml (rollover effects) that FP creates by itself.
If you are going to use a frameset strip the banner out and place it in a frame of it's own such that it also stays static, as you lose the feel of the site when the banner disappears.
fix the width of your site accurately. It currently stretches to fit the screen (1600x1200 in my case) and will make the txt you place on the page very hard to read, keep your line lengths down below 460 pixels. I'd suggest that you fix the width of the scrolling content page to make the site 760 pixels wide (perfect for an 800x600 display) oh yeah and don't use % based table widths in an unconstrained table! particularly when you have a table set to 101% width!
Other than that, keep it up, don't get disheartened, just play about and don't take too much stock of what everyone else says, you never know, they may well be wrong!
I think it looks good so far
Linear Mode
