C and S Design.
Search Friendly Programming and Design




Replacing Frames and IFrames

Replacing Frames

A website designed in a frameset, while it is very simple to arrange common features such as headers, navigation and page footer, it will also have distinct disadvantages from a usability aspect. Visitors will find it impossible to bookmark individual pages and where search engine crawlers are concerned, a good deal of work is needed to make all the pages in the website available to the SE spiders. Then, once they have been indexed and are appearing in the results, a way is then needed to ensure that these pages open as the designer intended, inside a frameset. Otherwise they appear as "orphaned" pages, with limited or no navigation into the rest of the site. The chances are when visitors land on one of these pages they will leave just as quickly.

Orphaned pages:
Pages that are orphaned are usually the end result of getting the search engine spiders to crawl beyond the frameset index, resulting in ranked pages with little or no navigation to the rest of the site.
Every website visitor looking to buy your product or service will want to check a site out before entering their credit card number into whatever processor you are using, so if they cannot find your privacy policy or terms and conditions easily, they will most likely leave and probably never visit again.

Frames really should be looked on as what was a short term solution for a problem and better ways exist now to enable the common features for a site that frames provided.
All commercial webhosts should support server-side includes (SSI) and/or a server-side scripting language which allows for including files. Using this for providing common features is definitely the way forward, It is a much better method that is friendlier for all visitors, human and robotic alike.

Replacing IFrames

Inline Frames (IFrames) are a little different. When used for displaying external content there can be a legitimate reason why the content should not be included as part of the parent page. This however should not be the case for the more general use where they are showing content from within the site. Many website designers using IFrames do not understand the issues with getting the entire site spidered and they are used simply to achieve a particular look to the design.
The examples in this section show how the same look, and more can be designed using basic HTML and some CSS styling on it. This makes the whole page code available to all user agents regardless of any limitations they may have.


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