It's A Frame-Up

To frame or not to frame, that is the question. It may be tempting to use frames in your website design because you may want a clear and clean look throughout your site, like headers, footers, menu bars, etc and frames make these easy to implement. Many users also find framed sites easy to navigate around and to find information. yet many times the disadvantages associated with frames render the whole idea not worth it. If someone specifically wants to use frames they will have to create duplicate pages though with no frame-sets to accommodate browsers who don't support frames and are therefore incompatible to pages with this framework. Additionally many search engines have difficulty ranking framed pages which may result in low ranking for your site for no good reason, other than the fact that you designed your site with frames! When everyone is working so hard to better their SEO why use the number one thing that is known to hinder the spiders?

The fact that the address bar doesn't change from page to page makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or share a link to a specific page on your site. This means that any time someone wants to return a to a specific page he would need to start searching through your whole site. Secondly, when a page from your site other than the frame-set shows up in search engine results , the visitor conducting the search will just see the sub-page without the surrounding frame. A framed site may also prevent the 'back' button on a screen from working properly. A disabled user employing the use of a screen reader may also find it difficult to navigate around such a site.

There are ways to combat these problems but the clunky javascript designed to help defeats the purpose of the frames in the first place! Instead of having your easy to use frames you are forced to play around with the javascript to combat its problems! in reality The preferred way of having the same elements on a page throughout a site is to use server-side includes. server side includes, or SSI, allow you to construct separate pages for inclusion in another 'main' page. SSI can be very effective when used together with tables. many times you may find one section of a page that you would like to appear on each page of your site. though it may seem ideal to frame it, you can achieve the same effect by using an SSI callout in a table cell within a page, and none of the problems associated with frames arise! So though frames may have their uses, it does seem fair to say that many strongly advise keeping your distance from this website format.