incrediBILL - 1:03 am on Jun 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

Everyone constantly worries about how to improve the "user experience" but nobody every discusses how to improve the Admin experience.

Today I was doing the same old mundane maintenance tasks on a site that is a grueling task of stepping through thousands of pieces of data, back and forth, extra windows opening and closing, a real tiresome bunch of clicking and waiting.

Then it struck me, FRAMES!

I quickly whipped out a frameset, put the admin code in a navigation column, changed all the links in the various pages to target the various frames instead of opening up in the same or a new window, and VOILA! had a high speed control panel that sped up the process almost 300%.

Now I can update 100 items in just a few minutes when previously it would've taken forever.

Imagine for instance with ecommerce you have a 3 column frameset with column 1 being all your categories, column 2 being the products for the selected category, then column 3 is a multi-row frame that contains the product (or category) edit frame and a frame below that could optionally show product options, shipping, or a product preview.

You can blaze through a catalog in just a few mere clicks vs. back and forth between a few various pages.

Bottom line is, if you're stuck working on some grueling admin task, could you improve the process with FRAMES?

The hour I spent making the admin process use FRAMES will probably save me over a hundred hours a year easily, maybe more.