By Robert Boilard

Of all the of websites on the net there are many of them that use frames in some capacity or another. I've been to many of them and I stop and check the code to see if there done right. Yes, there is a Right way to use frames; however, if done wrong, frames can be your worst mistake.

Let me explain. When you use frames it poses some problems for you and the search engines and ultimately your search engine position. There are trade offs that you have when you use frames and just a couple of them are listed here.

1. Sites that use frames are harder to build. They have to be perfect or you'll have pages that you don't want popping up.

2. You lose valuable screen space, the more frames and scroll bars the less working area you have.

3. They are confusing to the novice internet user.

4. Believe it or not there are still people surfing the net with non-frames browsers and many cases webmasters build a No Frames version anyway, so what's the point.

5. They pose a major technical problem with search engines. To date there are only two search engines that know how to handle frames (Alta Vista and Infoseek). These are the two largest search engines around, but what about all the other ones? When they crawl your page, all they see is a dead page unless you actually tell them what they are seeing. If done correctly you can overcome this. Your frames page should have a NOFRAMES section with a referring link to a Contents page that will have a link to every page in your website. Your page code should look like something like this:

The defacto standard has been to just put a note in the noframes section saying that "Your browser does not support Frames" and leaving the viewer no choice but to use the BACK button. However if you put in this section a reference to a contents page that the browsers and engines can follow (as above), they will bypass the frame and index all the pages on the contents page.

6. You have to (or you should) put full navigation controls on each and every page any ways, just in case someone comes into your site through the back door (and they will). What I mean by this is someone loading a page with out the frames page and if they do they will not have any navigation on the page and thus don't see the rest of your site. Now there is a way around this also, it's called JavaScript. By putting the code below in the head section of your pages (except your frames page) you can insure that 99% of users will load your frames page. The only way they won't is if they have their Java turned off or they have a non-java compatible browser.

Put this code in the head of your pages and change the <index.html> to the name of your main frames page.

Now I am not saying that Frames are bad, and in some cases they are absolutely necessary. Such is the case with our site at http://www.rbdesigns.com. We used frames for a very specific reason. It enabled us to share pages with our self replicating resellers pages and cutting down quit a bit of editing in case any changes need to made on a global basis. In my professional opinion, frames are good if they are used correctly, have a purpose, and add value to your site. I'll simplify that for you. If you don't need them don't use them.