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Design Tip:
To Frame Or Not To Frame?
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Frames used to be a dangerous proposition mainly because early browsers didn't adequately support their display. Although now 99% of your visitors use frames-compatible browsers, frames can still cause you problems. They confuse search engine robots, increase download times, and affect Web utilities that count pages.
Use frames in your site only if you have a very good reason and be sure to use good design techniques to prevent frames from ruining your visitors' experience.
Search Engines and Frames
Search engine robots have a hard time navigating through Web sites that use frames unless the site designers have been careful to include the proper tags and site navigation tools.
Robots are designed to crawl through Web sites by following links. Think about how a frameset is organized though: the file contains instructions for the browser about which files to include in the frames and how to lay out those frames. If that is the only information contained in the file, the robot doesn't go any deeper into the site because there is no navigation information.
The solution is to include site information (including your keywords!) and alternate site links in the <NOFRAMES> tag. Too often, this tag contains the useless statement: "This site uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them." Astute Web designers include more friendly - and useful comments such as:
<noframes>
<body>
<H1>Welcome to Gentle Giants: The
Maine Coon Cat Home Page!</H1>
<p>We provide a complete reference
for people interested in breeding
Maine Coon Cats. Browse our
photographs, cat show schedules,
breeder and medical updates.</p>
<p>If you are viewing this page,
then your browser doesn't support
frames. However, all our pages can
be viewed from our Site Contents
page.</p>
<p>Please come inside!</p>
<p>
<a href="SiteContents.htm">Enter</a>
</p>
</noframes>
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This information helps a robot score the page content and gives it a link to follow through the rest of the site.
Don't Send This Page To A Friend
One of the most important ways to promote your Web site is through social filtering - a kind of word of mouth advertising where a visitor emails your site's URL to a list of friends. This type of personal recommendation is invaluable: consider how many sites include an email link inviting you to "Send this page to a friend!" and how likely you are to visit pages that friends recommend.
If you use frames, you may be unintentionally disabling this by preventing visitors from mailing the URL of pages deep within your site.
For instance, suppose you visit a Web site called 'frameworld.com', where every page is embedded in a frame. If you want to email a friend about a great article somewhere in the site, it can be hard to figure out exactly what the URL of that page really is. The top-level URL "frameworld.com" will always appear in our browser's address field, no matter what page we're viewing. So you can't just cut and paste that URL into an email.
When the recipient clicks on the URL, the site home page loads - not the intended page. It would probably be easy to find the correct page in a small site but would be much more difficult in a site with several hundred other pages.
Note that this same problem will keep people from bookmarking pages deep within a frames site.
Have You Been Framed?
You'd think it would be impossible to design a site that uses frames and NOT realize it, but it's easier than you think if you use some free Web hosts. For instance, Yahoo!GeoCities provides disk space, page templates, FTP access, and more - all at no cost. Beginning webmasters use it to experiment with different techniques before purchasing a top-level domain name and paying for hosting.
However, few clients are aware that GeoCities encloses its clients' free Web sites inside a GeoCities frame. If you are one of the many people who use free hosting services, be sure to check with your host to determine their frames policy and design your Web site accordingly. Otherwise, you could have trouble with search engines, social filtering, and Web site management tools without realizing the underlying problem.
Web Site Tools And Frames
Many Web site management tools and utilities determine Web site size by counting pages in a Web site. Since the frameset itself is saved as an HTML document, the utilities count each frameset as an additional page; Web sites that use frames may actually consist of far more documents than you expect. Keep this in mind if you utilize a service that charges based on page count.
For instance, we determine the annual subscription cost of NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox based on the number of pages in your Web site. Depending on how you organize your site and utilize frames, framesets may drastically increase the size of your Web site.
Consider the difference in page count between a site with 50 content pages and 1 frameset and a site with 50 content pages and 10 different framesets. Both sites use a left-hand navigation frame and a main contents frame.
- Single Frameset:
| 1 |
Frameset HTML file |
| 50 |
Content Pages |
| 51 |
Pages Total Web Site Size |
- Multiple Framesets:
| 10 |
Frameset HTML files |
| 50 |
Content Pages |
| 60 |
Pages Total Web Site Size |
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Larger sites can contain hundreds of pages. As sites grow more complex, the cost of many Web management tools increases as well. Structure your framesets carefully to avoid increased costs.
The concept of frames is simple: they allow browsers to display multiple pages within the same window as a single unit. It sounds like a good idea at first glance but consider the implications for search engine robots and humans visitors before you decide.
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