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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 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 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.
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.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").
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.
Richard Igoe is the driving force behind TheWebsEye, a newly launched website which is a complete information source on what websites need to promote and market themselves. It is also building up a library of useful website design articles and a list of website developers. If you have something to contribute please visit the http://www.TheWebsEye.com Library to submit your article for inclusion.
