Frames or No Frames
Updated on July 28, 2007
Frames make bookmarking difficult.
If you've ever been to a site that uses frames, and finally clicked through the links to get to the page you want, then bookmarked the page, you've probably discovered that when you click on your bookmark, it takes you to the main frames page, not the page you actually want. This is irritating at best and can lead to a loss in visitors who just give up.
Frames make it harder for search engines to find you.
Some search engines won't pay attention to the content of the frames, only the frames page itself. This means that search engines may fail to index your site based on your content, reducing the number of visitors who will find you via search engines.
Frames make navigating more difficult.
It will inevitably happen when you use frames to separate a navigation pane from the content pages. One of your navigation links will have an error, causing your content page to show up in your navigation frame. This will confuse newbies and irritate experienced web surfers.
Another confusing and irritating problem with frame navigation occurs when you try to send your visitors to an outside link. If you don't code your link properly, the external website will show up in your frame, making it difficult for visitors to leave your site. This may sound like a good idea to keep visitors on your website and looking at your ads, but it's so irritating that those visitors will probably not come back to your site.
Frames make for bad printouts.
If somebody wants to print a page form your frames page, they may get a printout of all the frames on your page, partial views of frames on your page, or just a single frame (and who knows if it will be the frame they want to print).
Frames can be useful tools.
W3C Schools use frames properly on their "try it" pages. They have a frame that displays code and a frame that displays the results. They want visitors to be able to view both web pages (the code page and the result page) at the same time.
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