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When I started thinking of this article I had seen lots of articles that said do not use frames and I thought to myself that the articles were very one sided and didn't give any reasons for using or not using frames. So I decided it was time to try and look at both sides of the question and talk about that. This is what I have tried to do here.

Frames Yes......

When frames first came out they made some things easier or cooler like:

• Navigation
• Keeping your visitors in your site even if they are viewing someone else site.
• Maybe you like scroll bars.
• Table of contents
  • Where you have one small column on the left with table of contents links and with the content of the individual "table of contents" link  in the big column on the right.
• Compare two documents
  • By presenting the documents side by side in like size columns so your visitor can view both, easily seeing where they are different.
• Give explanations in a frame next to a list of technical terms.
• Display footnotes along the side or at the bottom in a footer.
• Associating an image of a painting with the text history residing in a frame next to it but with several paintings and their history on a page.
• Protect images, if you had to scroll to see the full image then it could be harder to steal them.

Frames No......

Those sound like acceptable uses for frames and at one time they were. However, today it would be better to use CSS for most of them. For many people framed pages can be quite confusing if they are not done with a great amount of taste. For example, let's say you use frames, and your page is set for 1152x864 resolution. Your visitor, with lots of money to spend, comes to your site but is using 800x600 resolution then that person may have to deal with not only scrolling both up and down, right to left but would need to try find your frame's scroll bars and deal with scrolling them also. I know I would just leave and so would everyone I know. That much work with scroll bars is too much trouble and it says the owner of the site either doesn't care or is too unprofessional to get their site working at it's best and for their visitors. As with any technology you need to be aware that there are advantages and disadvantages.  I guess the greatest disadvantage for using frames is:

• Search engines spiders do not read framed pages.
  • The only information they get from a framed page is the HTML description for the outline of the frame.
  • They don't see any links to follow or any content to send back to their search engine.
  • Your site will not be indexed by the search engines.
  • It used to be you could count on your meta tags giving the search engines some information about your site.
    • But now search engines like Google place much more importance on the content and the meta tags are used more for verification of quality and to determine whether the page is spamming or not.

Let's face it if you want a popular site, one with lots of customers then you need to get visitors to your site. No one can get enough visitors by word of mouth alone. I've been making websites for years and the ways to get people to come to your site are limited at best. Believe me when I say you need search engines to index your page if you want visitors or to make money from your website in any way.  This includes the sites that are designed just to have people click on their advertising banners and links just so the owner can get paid from the advertising agency that put the banners and links on the page. Why would anyone go to the trouble and expense to set up a Internet website store or business and then use frames, which in doing so cuts out over half of their chance of making any money for their efforts?  That is like opening up a barber shop and posting a gone fishing sign on the door all the time. In conclusion I have decided that while there are some good uses for frames in very select situations. Like they may be useful for:

• Religious sites
• Organizational sites
• Corporate sites
  • That are for internal use. Where they don't rely on search engines or outside traffic. Then frames can be quite useful (if tastefully done).

However, for anyone that is trying to get outside visitors or customers to come to their site then frames are a site killer and a waste of time and effort. I believe that by reading this article and checking for yourself to see that what I said here is true then you can only come to one conclusion and that is frames are only good for about 10% of the webmasters and that all the rest of us should avoid frames.

About the Author:

DonEc is the designer, creator and owner of Best Web Stop (bestwebstop.net). He has been working with computers since 1974 and been creating websites with WYSIWYG non-HTML web programs since 1992. He is retired and provides No Cost WebSite instruction via Best Web Stop as a service to people that want to have a totally free, no cost presence on the web or just want to avoid learning HTML. In some cases he has been known to build sites for a small fee if asked. However, he requires the owner of the site to learn how to create a site so they can maintain the site themselves.

Copy and/or reproduction of this article is allowed as long as it is not altered in any way and the section "About the Author" is kept with the article including these instructions. Article Copyright © 2005 by DonEc

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