Forum Moderators: phranque
Hope you can help and i that i havent bored you with a boring subject!
www.dionaea.com/web/frames.html
Regards,
Brent
But you really need to be sure that your search engine traffic doesn't get an "orphaned" page, outside of it's native frameset. That's extra maintenance, for sure.
I'll share my experience with "flattening" two framed sites, one with no content or graphic changes. I expected to get better search engine listings, and that happened for some of the site.
So I expected more traffic and slightly more repeat traffic because bookmarking would now work OK, and that happened.
But here was the big surprise. I watch a stickiness statistic for my clients - pageviews per unique. I thought this would naturally go down a bit, because I wasn't loading three pages into a frameset for one single page view anymore.
But in both cases, pageviews per unique nearly doubled. That amazed me, but the stat held up, week after week. And more importantly, sales also nearly doubled for one client, and went up a good bit for the other.
I now believe that only some people really "get" what frames are all about - especially the more technically minded, left-brain types. For a significant percentage of the population framesets are a mind boggle. frames are just too much of departure from the normal paradigm of a web page for these users to feel comfortable.
So for my work, I go the "easy" way and stay with flat HTML pages. Nearly double on pageviews per unique convinced me that no matter how much I may appreciate frames, there is a significant group who never will.
Frames have the occasional usefulness. But I treat them like Flash. It's an accent, and not the way to do an entire website.
But now I hear they're spiderable. They are? Since when? Everyone's always told me that spiders don't index them well, which suited me fine; I never learned to use them because I never liked them.
Our target audience for the site is quite unsophisticated, they keep telling me. So I've tried to resist whenever they tried to get me to make the site navigation more difficult to use. The boss has an infatuation with Microsoft.com, and wants our site to look just like it, despite the fact that we haven't nearly that quantity of information. He wants the page cluttered up like that. So I don't know where he got the idea of frames; Microsoft.com doesn't use them.
Sigh.
So what I'm saying is, I can't lie to my boss: if frames are spiderable, then frames are spiderable. But perhaps i can cling in desperation to your statistics on stickiness. I don't really grok frames; maybe if I can point out that most of our users wouldn't either, I could win the argument.
(And before you ask, yes I did try the argument that "I've just spent three months working on it and have just finished it, so redesigning it again now would be inefficient" and he didn't seem to care at all.)
If you use frames, and you don't block spiders from your content pages, then you're going to have to have some sort of navigation in your content pages. This doesn't have to be anything more than rudimentary, but it certainly means some sort of duplication. Or maybe you could do something with .htaccess. Or maybe (best option) your partner/boss could give up on the idea of frames.
I have, on occasion, come across framed sites with no navigation in the content pages. I've arrived at a content page via a search engine, found some of what I was looking for, but, the rest of it being on other pages, have had to fiddle around with the URL to navigate the site until I stumbled on the frame. It's a bizarre experience - a bit like a woman unexpectedly biting my outstretched finger, but not nearly as pleasurable..
a simple JavaScript avoids orphaned pages (never bothered to fix it for jeeves though as the content pages work well on their own.)
Been developing my plan to flatten for around 2 years now, and I think I'll soon have it ;)
SN
[edited by: oilman at 4:37 pm (utc) on July 11, 2003]
[edit reason] no personal urls please [/edit]
I've had a framed site (section of a site) for years and it has slowly gained better rankings by the SE's. I can't tell you how many problems it has caused though. Maybe I didn't do things properly. I would show your boss/partner some of the Web's most successful sites. And point out that almost none of them use frames.
frames are old. period. they have there purpose, but look ugly. to be absolutly honest, I wouldnt take a site too seriously if it still used frames for navigation layout. (but yea, theres exceptions to this) :)
frames ugly. period :)
The only way that I have noticed that our site has gotten spidered is (using Frontpage that is) to include content in the Unframed portion of the site. Only when we started to do that did we see results. Do nto know if this will help you but it did for us.
EastCoastButterfly
a simple JavaScript avoids orphaned page
We've got one here, on message #21 [webmasterworld.com]
frames ugly. period
You can turn off the frameborders - helps a lot
Sorry, I like FRAMEs and IFRAME
Although frames have been spidered pretty well for about two years, iFrame spiderability is a problem right now. The links which CHANGE the iframe using a target attribute will get picked up just fine, but there are lots of reports that Google is choking on the initial src attribute of an iframe element. So make sure the initial page loaded in an iframe has a straight link somehere else, like on a sitemap or the bottom of the page in text.
...my boss
dragonlady7, someone else's stats may not be all that convincing -- but how about the fact that noone can bookmark the page? How about the fact that you cannot easily get links to any inner pages? Ot use links in emails?
[edited by: tedster at 3:55 pm (utc) on July 11, 2003]
Does this happen to you often? LOL. :-) I get yelled at for biting.
Anyhow.
This has been very informative for me as well. I never learned to use frames because I was simply told "they're old and were a good idea but it's easier to do the same thing in any of about 8 different ways, and most of the time when people use them they screw it up." So I've just never bothered with them.
And, well, that impression has been pretty well confirmed, but with much more concrete examples. :)
So, I'm glad. Thanks, everybody! Maybe I can be convincing, finally.
It just seems to me that... if I can do what I want, in a simpler way, why wouldn't I? When speaking a foreign language, engaging in a project, writing an essay, or making a website, I've always found that doing things the simplest way possible (including complex things!) is almost always the best way to go. So why, why, why would you do something that requires so much focus, so much effort, so much extra structural design, if you don't have to? I just haven't been able to understand what my boss was even trying to get at.
And even if it were already in frames, doing a complex process to simplify the end result still seems like a winning proposition. Easier maintenance, more reliable navigation, better spiderability?
Ah well. Again, thanks for all the pointers, everyone.
Browser support is growing for this and this will someday soon it will be a practical option.
You can now get the exact same effect using a div and the style command scroll:vertical (or something).
/claus
That should end the discussion right then and there about why NOT to use frames.
backward links on framed sites... inside pages
That's one of the big drawbacks. People can only link to the home page. Or, if you have a javascript in place that reunites orphans with their frameset, the other websmaster still need to realize that you've done that, and then get the URL of the inside content page, which is a PITA. No one ever bothers.
I've had a few framed sites with inside page backward links -- from another domain that I set up. But those sites are all flattened now.
Pseudocode:
if document.search {
var inFrame = document.search()
} else {
var inFrame = page-one.html
}document.write("<frame src='inFrame'>")
- links would then be: www.example.com/?thisPage.htm
Of course it only works for js-enabled, but they will be able to bookmark. SEs still don't run javascripts.
/claus
