Frames: How to Revive and Reuse

We’ve seen the frame layout live and rise to its peak in the 90’s, and then quietly and slowly die down as the Internet expanded, became more accessible, and produced more innovative self-taught web designers. With the many possibilities of HTML being discovered by the more creative World Wide Web users, the restrictive and tedious frames were easily replaced by the more versatile and visually appealing tables, divs, pop-ups, etc. In this era of limitless creative expression, could there be perhaps a way to reinvent the outdated and prejudiced "frames"?

First, use frames sparingly. There should be just two frames in a web page, at the most. And if possible, make the page on the other frame compliment the main frame, not be a part of it. Frames are often not used because they destroy the unifying element of a page, which makes it have more than one URL. Since websites with frames have two or more URLs, most of the time search engines only get to see a part of it since they only supply one of the URLs. It would be better, then, to just have a complimenting page, instead of having a part of the main page in the other frame, like the navigation. This prevents your visitors from not being able to use the main sites due to the absence of some of its components.

A frame should only be added to the site as a complement. The focus should not be divided between the two, but rather mainly on one frame. Minimize or remove altogether the heavy scrollbars and borders that the side frame has in order to make the site itself appear less clunky and take on a sleeker and more harmonious side. Frames need to be created for a purpose, not just because you thought that it would be nice to have a frame and create a half-hearted page for it. That’s not how it works. Visitors might get annoyed if your frame doesn’t serve any purpose.

You could also try making use of Inline frames, or iFrames. IFrames are like frames, except that they don’t have to be on the side. They can be on the middle, a suspending frame of a sort. Although it still presents the problems of normal frames, iFrames have the advantage of being allow-able of being put anywhere in your site where you need it. Many search engines, though, don’t crawl through iFrames like normal frames so be wary of using them for text or other things that you would want Google to see.

If you get lost along the way, you can just use programs like the Sitegrinder Photoshop plug-in to help you put up frames. If you really can’t put up a frame, the best thing to do would be to create a pseudo-frame using the "DIV" HTML tag. Again, Sitegrinder (or any other WYSIWYG application) can help you through that problem. Remember, frames aren’t really that important, in fact they are discouraged by many, but it still has some benefits that you can gain from using it.

Sitegrinder
Contains tutorials and such on building your own website from Photoshop without any manual coding.