Continued from page 1
2) Some search engines only index
home.htm or index.htm page without spidering
rest of
site, so unless you have good tags your site might not rank very well, especially since many search 500 engines also take into account
contents of your pages and frames are treated as hyperlinks to other pages. You can however get around this by creating "doorway" pages which redirect visitors to your index.htm page.
To redirect a visitor from an optimized "doorway" page you simply put
following line in your
section.and replace index.htm with
page you want to redirect
visitor to.
The other aspect here is that for search engines which only index your home page, you would need to submit each of your site content pages separately. If one of these content pages is indexed and found in a search,
visitor will 600 only see
contents page and will not see
rest of your site, something you definitely don't want to happen ! This brings us to
next and maybe
most important disadvantage of using frames.
3)Frames can make it difficult for you to direct people to a particular page on your site. This is especially so if you want to use email to send a visitor to a particular page that has details of an affiliate program for example. If you don't send them to your index.htm page they will not be able to see
rest of your site, only
contents of
page you have directed them to. 700
4)Frames within frames can be confusing, so you have to pay special attention to your hyperlinks when you are designing your pages. For example if one of
links in your main or contents frame redirects a visitor back to
index.htm page,
result will be a mess unless
hyperlink specifies
target frame as "top" (eg: ) to prevent
index page opening inside
contents page.All in all, whether you use frames or not is a personal decision, but you need to aware of
advantages and disadvantages before you design your site.
Learning how to use frames is easy once you have mastered
concept that a hyperlink can lead to a page in its own frame (TARGET="_self")
default option, or in another frame in
frameset eg:(TARGET="main").

Richard Igoe is the driving force behind TheWebsEye, a newly launched website which is building up a library of useful website design articles. If you have something to contribute please visit the http://TheWebsEye.com Library to submit your article for inclusion. We are also building a list of website designers with links to their work.