Expression® Web Design
Building a Site with Frames
Friday, December 12, 2008
I know, people everywhere tell you it is bad to use frames when developing a website. But you like frames because when you need to add a page to your navigation, you only need to change one page. (You can do that with server side includes.)I would just like to show you though one (of many) reasons why it is not a good idea to use frames. Let's say you are only using a left frame for navigation and then a right frame for the content. (By the way, if you are using Expression Web, you will need to add your Frameset DOCTYPE:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
since Microsoft forgot to add this DOCTYPE when you create a new page.) So you have three pages now: With server side includes, you would only have two pages (nav and home). This is probably all good and you realize that your website is now in your favorite search engine. You realize though that it takes the user to the contact page, where all they can do is submit their information and then get a page that suggests they review your website. What happened to the navigation? This is one of the bigger problems when using frames - you run the risk of losing visitors because they have nowhere to go.
Now if you look at your favorite search engine again to see that only your contact page is coming up - you actually see your navigation on the left hand side. And the user can continue browsing your website.
There are some ways around this, like forcing frames (which uses JavaScript), but that is not reliable.
There are other reasons why not to use frames, but I am hoping that this example will help you to understand one of the bigger reasons not to use frames. Watch the video tutorial for a search engine result example on why not to use frame to help you see exactly what would happen when a specific URL / path comes up in a search engine, rather than your domain name. Hopefully this will help you to understand one of the reasons why not to use frames.
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