Help me get away from Frames

Header-sidemenu-content fairly basic design

[HHEAdmin]

I am a novice web designer attempting to set up a small, functional website.

The original design of the site which I came up with back in September is currently dependent on a two frame design, in which the left-hand menu frame holds the menu and the 'main' frame hosts the content. However the more I read about web design and practice, the less appropriate the current design seems. At the same time, I could do with some guidance on redesigning the interface to be more user- and search engine-friendly.

The main requirement of the design is that I can have side menus that are specific to the page that the user is currently on. This is working with the frames design at the moment, but the 'back' button is broken on these pages. Other than this I'm just aiming for a functional, cross-browser-compatible design without too much hard-to-maintain code.

[monkeythumpa]

Frames are not the SEO nightmare they used to be. With recent tech developments and changes in the algo, framed sites are no longer penalized because of spider accessability or internal inbound links.

If you don't like the look, that is another thing, but I wouldn't spend a ton of time on it if you are only doing it for SEO.

FWIW - All my sites are frameless.

[rocknbil]

Well I don't like frames because of the problems it creates for the user, but it's like quitting smoking, any reason is a good reason. :-)

One of the biggest reasons people like to use frames is reduced maintenance of navigation, they only have to edit one file (this could be called laziness or efficiency, depending on how you see it.) The same can be done using server side includes, where a single file is included in the page:
<!-- #include file="mynav.txt" -->

You can emulate your framed design almost exactly with non-framed layouts. The old school (and deprecated) methods using tables works well, if you are good with tables:

<table width="95%" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<!-- #include file="mynav.txt" --> <br>
OR <br>
Hard-code your nav here
</td>
<td valign="top">
And here be your content
</td>
</tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="footlinks">
And here be the footer links
</td></tr>
</table>

But as is said over and over, time and again . . . you should not use tables for layout. You can dig through the CSS forum for any number of ways to emulate the above using pure CSS but when it's all said and done, neither is terribly difficult to convert from frames.