WEB DESIGN BYTES
A regular feature on our website is our 'web design bytes,' small, quick-read articles with some web design food for thought. |
|
HTML Frames: Framed for a Reason
Once common on websites, HTML frames now ensure that most of your site will go completely ignored by search engines...here's why.
Posted by Chris McDowell - Jan. 17, 2008
The other day, I was asked to give my opinion of a website. When I found out that it had been built with HTML frames, I started thinking about the dangers of out-of-date frames. I decided to share with you some information as to why designing this way should be avoided at all costs.
What are frames?
Frames have been around since the early days of HTML, and in a nutshell, they are a way of displaying several individual web pages together on one page.
In the image below, there are 3 separate web pages. Index, Header & Content.html. Index.html is the main page, and it pulls the other 2 pages into its space through the use of frames. The major benefit of doing this is when a visitor wants to scroll down through the content (FRAME 3), the menu (FRAME 1) & header (FRAME 2) will stay fixed in place.
index.html loads header & content.html into the same page
using frames...3 separate eb pages displayed in 1 window
Keep in mind as you consider the usefulness of a fixed menu & header - having your site content displayed within a frame means that a search engine WILL NOT index it. Google, and most of the other search engines will not reference any information displayed within a frame.
I've seen sites like that...what's wrong with it?
While your desire to use frames may be 100% legitimate, most uses of frames are not. The simple fact is that they are easily abused...and here's how it's done.
Say for instance I set up a website at MyKeyShop.com for a small business that makes keys. If I wanted, I could set it using frames like the graphic below. Now...what if, because of my interests, I wanted to add links to NASA, Wikipedia, Microsoft & the White House? If I placed those links in the main section of MyKeyShop.com, then clicking on them the browser would load those websites in a frame...so you'd be surfing someone else's site but still on your own.
external links on the left load the respective sites on the right...you
may be viewing NASA, but a search engine still thinks it's on your site
Now, this creates a significant problem for a search engine, because if they visit MyKeyShop.com to index the site, they'll be following those links, and be forced to reference not only information about keys, but also the entire NASA, Wikipedia, Microsoft & White House websites all under MyKeyShop.com! Not only is this a heck of a lot of information for the search engine to reference, but most of the content it's referencing has nothing to do with keys! Wave goodbye to any hope of relevant results if someone searches for 'White House' on Google and up comes a shop that makes keys. Unless the President lost his set and needs a replacement, there's just no relevant link between the MyKeyShop site & the content that it's loading.
As I said, even if your use of frames is legitimate, there is such a huge possibility of abuse that Google has shut the door and no longer references content contained in frames. If today's Google went to MyKeyShop.com as laid out in the graphic above, the only thing it would reference is what is directly in the main page (just the menu & link text). Everything else is ignored.
What if I really want to keep the menu fixed in one place?
No problem. A similar effect can be recreated using the newer-technology CSS (cascading style sheets). As well as being search-engine friendly, CSS also conforms to web standards as laid out by W3C.org, the World Wide Web Consortium.
Do you have an old website with frames and want to have your site seen by search engines again? Call us today at (559) 683-4030 or e-mail us through our contact form.
|
