To Frame or Not to Frame: A Comprehensive Guide to Website Design

Jan 2
22:17

2024

Richard Igoe

Richard Igoe

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This article delves into the advantages and disadvantages of using frames in website design, with a particular focus on how they can impact your search engine ranking. When creating a new website, one of the initial decisions you need to make is whether to incorporate frames. Frames technology enables you to display multiple web pages on your screen simultaneously. While frames can offer certain benefits, they also come with potential drawbacks that need to be considered.

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Advantages of Using Frames

  • Enhanced Navigation: Frames can improve your site's navigability by providing a constantly visible navigation menu. As any seasoned web designer knows,To Frame or Not to Frame: A Comprehensive Guide to Website Design Articles easy navigation is a crucial aspect of website design.

  • Increased Speed: Frames can boost your site's speed as they allow you to include the site theme (images, logo, etc.) and the navigation menu in frames that don't need to be downloaded each time a visitor opens a new page. Only the contents page changes. For instance, the website success center at crosswinds.net uses this technique effectively.

  • Simplified Design and Maintenance: Frames can simplify the design and maintenance of your site, especially for larger websites. For instance, if you want to add a new page linked from other pages on your site, you only need to add a link on your navigation menu, not on every page.

  • Engaging Design: Frames can make your site more engaging and allow you to have permanently visible advertising banners. The Word magazine site www.word.com is a great example of this.

Disadvantages of Using Frames

  • Limited Browser Support: While the number of browsers that don't support frames is dwindling, it's still a factor to consider. You can circumvent this by including a noframes area below your frameset with a simple navigation menu and a statement indicating that the browser does not support frames.

  • Search Engine Indexing Issues: Some search engines only index the home or index page without spidering the rest of the site. This can negatively impact your site's ranking unless you have good meta tags. However, you can create "doorway" pages that redirect visitors to your index page to overcome this.

  • Difficulty Directing Traffic: Frames can make it challenging to direct people to a specific page on your site, especially if you're using email to send a visitor to a particular page with details of an affiliate program, for example.

  • Confusing Nested Frames: Frames within frames can be confusing, requiring careful attention to your hyperlinks when designing your pages.

In conclusion, the decision to use frames or not is subjective and should be based on a thorough understanding of their pros and cons. Once you grasp the concept that a hyperlink can lead to a page in its own frame or in another frame in the frameset, using frames becomes relatively straightforward.