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Can you expand on this? I'm considering using iframes for a section of my site and am also interested in the specific drawbacks.
Anybody have good experiences in using them or advice on good implementation?
First, the src+ attribute for iframes does not seem to be followed by search engines spiders. So somewhere you must provide a "straight" link to the original iframed page.
And second, consider what happens if a visitor is sent straight to an iframed page, orphaned from its parent. You need to handle this situation so they can still investigate the rest of your site, should they wish to. There are javascript solutions for this (slight modifications of the same solutions for standard frames), and there may be server side solutions, but ignoring it is wasting traffic.
I've had a bit of experience with framed sites, and at this point I've turned them all into "flat" pages. The stats show greatly increased stickiness (e.g pages per unique and so on) when the site is flattened, even though no content has changed.
My opinion is that only a certain percentage of internet users really "get" what frames are all about. The rest are confounded and confused.
Although it's a little complicated beyond my preference, it's working out well with alot of help from css.
A few things I ran across:
Keep the file size of the content loading in the iframe as small as possible; avoid multiple iframes on one page - pretty horrible rendering effects in IE if the user scrolls before they're loaded;
I've also noticed that links for javascript pop-up windows interrupt the iframe content loading so that if a user clicks it before it's completed you're left with whatever was rendered up to that point - this occurs in IE 5+, NN 7, & Opera 7.
That's basically what I am thinking of doing.
I currently have a flat "widget" page where the buy button opens a frameset with the supplier's order page.
<aside>I've just spent five minutes trying to describe what options I have and what I would like to do. It seems so simple when you think it -- putting it into words is something else. Guess that's why I'm just *thinking* about using iframes. I deleted the confusing description.</aside>
I'd like to change the current setup to where the current flat page includes the widget content in an iframe, then the buy button calls the supplier's order page into the same iframe.
That's the easy part (along with tedster's cautions on orphaned pages -- had a lot of experience with that when the entire site was in frames).
The most important reason I'm leery of using iframes is problems of controlling the iframe size, to try to get away from any scroll bars. I'd like the page to "look" flat. So I'm just going to play around with it in the coming weeks and see what happens.
Thanks for the info.
In my case I have a target="_top" included in the form action for the add-to-cart button, so the user goes to the shopping cart page, unframed.
Something to watch out for if your supplier's order page will be in the iframe is that, at default settings and unless a p3p privacy policy is in place on the targeted domain, IE6 will not accept third party cookies and will not provide a prompt that it is rejecting the cookie - which will throw a monkey wrench into alot of ecommerce programs.
Don't have to worry about the security part. After all choices are made the supplier's final order page (credit card info, etc.) is opened in a new window. It's a bit disconcerting, but branded and worked well in regular frames so don't anticipate too much of a problem here (though if I ever get the hang of xml I'll keep much more onsite).
