Website Design in Frames  -  November 3, 2006

Another “old drunk uncle” of website design is the use of frames on a website. A frameset used to be a popular and common way to let website designers create a single page that pulls in code from other pages and places it in set frames on the page. The advantage of this was that the header, footer or navigation bars would only need to be loaded once, saving bandwidth. It also allowed for parts of the page to be fixed while others could scroll.

The main disadvantage of using a frameset is that the content pulled in to the frames is impossible for a search engine to crawl, making it very difficult to index the site. This can be very damaging for a business hoping to find passing trade through search engines.

Fortunately there are a few ways to replicate a frameset and have the actual content on the page. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow you to place sections of content in fixed positions anywhere on a page, and make other sections scroll if required; while server-side languages such as PHP let website designers dynamically include external content depending on a given variable passed to the page. This way the effect of having an organised, seperated page is achieved while keeping all the content on each page for the search engines to index.

Rik Weber
SEO Programmer

rikweb at 5:15 pm

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