I have some simple ~5-page informational sites, with a Menu in the left column, text and images in the center and AdSense in the right column. These columns are done as divs, but I'm wondering if future sites should just use frames. The left Menu column would be a static frame since it never changes. In fact, the right Adsense column hardly changes on some of the very-tightly-focused sites, so maybe it should be a static frame also. The only effect of clicking a Menu item would be to change the informative text and images in the center column. Would there any downsides to this possible retro approach? swoop
I don't know why people don't use frames much anymore. I guess having everything in DIVs is more flexible and therefore looks better. I guess one file is easier to manage and update than five are as well.
I think the frame problem is the indexing issue. You can get same look with non-frame page and put menu, banner etc in an include. Shannon
Use either a Server Side Include or start using PHP includes for static site-wide content. It is not necessary to use frames in this case. There is really nothing wrong with frames, but why use them when you don't need to. All the best, Jay
Frames also have the advantage of reducing bandwidth and load on the server. I like iframes for some content also.
While technically php will cause a load increase on the server, it is usually not a noticeable one from the end-user perspective. There should be little or no increased bandwidth as any images in the includes will be cached so all that should be coming through the pipe is the html via php. Using frames for the sake of saving bandwidth is almost silly. There are not too many uses for frames that can't be done otherwise. All the best, Jay
you forget if you are changing only one part of the page, the frames do not all get reloaded, and in cases they do often can come from the cache instead. in some designs the savings is far from silly.
frames makes pages ugly in some cases ...and to customize you should know all attributes of it ,,mainly of "border" ....divs are nice and have css,seo flexibility.spiders have chance of missing content in framed sites
Frames *can* be nice. In fact, before AdSense comes into the picture and I was doing my websites for fun, I used frames extensively (as long as I set frame border = 0) But now, with everyone fighting for place on SERPs, having frames no longer suitable due to indexing issue. May I suggest using SSI? (I just learned it and it works great!)
Frames aren't a bad idea, unless any one of the following issues are a concern for you: 1. Leaving orphaned pages for search engines to pick up out of context. 2. Making it so people can't bookmark certain pages of your site. 3. Making it so people can't send direct links to pages of your site to friends. 4. Making it so future browsing devices can't use your site (cellphones, PDAs, toasters, whatever). 5. Making it so people with certain degrees of visual impairment can't use your site. 6. Making it so people who turn off IFrames can't see your site (IFrames are commonly used to deliver advertisements, and many proxy services kill them). 7. Making it so search engines have little or no usable content to index with the top-level page of your domain. Other than that, I suppose frames aren't bad. Oh, wait, yes they are There is no frames effect that cannot be achieved better using includes and the CSS overflow property. The server load caused by includes is so miniscule, I'd wager it is statistically insignificant. Lose the frames. Who are frames nice for, visitors? Visitors don't know the difference (unless they can't use your site properly because you've used frames). The designer? Technology has come a long way since 1996. Frames are not nicer than the development methods available today.
Using frames is not really a good idea at all for indexing your site with Google and Yahoo. Both can't really use their robots to index your site properly. Plus frames look bad. To see an example of a 'clean' non frame site, goto