Should I Use Frames?

For most of our work, we discourage the use of frames. There are three reasons for this:

Frames increase the number of pages in a site, making the site more difficult to manage. This also increases development cost.
Frame-based sites are more difficult to use, particularly for someone new at the Internet. The back arrows and printing of pages can be very difficult unless the site is designed right, which again increases development cost. Some frame-based sites have a button to drop to a page without frames for the user to print a page.
Search engines don't work right with frame-based sites unless they are specifically designed right. For example, assume a master page loads a left and right frame, with the right frame containing the content. The navigation buttons are in the left frame. The search engine (which indexes based on content) will pick up only the right frame. When the site is accessed from the search engine it will have no navigation buttons. The way to fix this is to build a separate gateway page that is accessed from the search engine that contains enough content to get the site indexed. Using the META tags won't help solve the problem, as most search engines don't use them for much.

The best alternative to using frames is generally to use tables. With tables, you have strong control of the layout. You can create virtual frames with tables and do almost anything you can with frames. One word of caution, however: You can nest tables, and often complex designs can have 11 or more tables. Chasing down a defective table tag can be murder in this case. To build the tables, use an editor such as Dreamweaver(TM) or Microsoft FrontPage(TM) that sets up the table and controls the HTML tags for you.

There are occasions, however,when you might wish to use frames. One of the most classic sites we did using frames was for selling a selection of MLM products. Although we had our own web site for the products, the product directory was put in a frame on my web page that was updated from the MLM company. The page looked like our page, but always had the latest in products, product descriptions (just click on the product), and prices. We didn't have to update the site. The site worked and we had orders from all over. Later the company decided if you wanted a product web site, you had to purchase one of their canned sites at $25/month. The canned sites sold products, not problem solutions. It didn't work and we discontinued working the with MLM. They didn't understand the problem-to-solution format for building sites that worked.

The page that you are looking at now is frame based, with a left pane containing a menu that is used for all tips.Since this page is not submitted to any search engine, we can get away with this. Even this is dangerous, however, as search engines can use spiders to find pages (without you submitting anyting) and this page frame could still get indexed with no navigation button. We added one navigation button on this right pane - just in case.

In summary, we encourage using tables where possible, and if frames are used for the home page to build a gateway page for the search engine.