The Extinction of Frame Layouts

When the Internet was not yet the global phenomenon that it is today, websites of the days past could be considered primitive by today’s standards. Their common characteristics were simplicity; having a straightforward design composed of center-aligned text, varying in font types and colors; horizontal lines as a means of dividing the "sections" of the page with minimal images and no effects whatsoever. People treated web pages much like a standard document files - since they haven’t been able to explore the potentials of HTML yet. One of the common types of layouts applied before is called the "frames." Unfortunately, we rarely see this type of layout nowadays.

First of all, what are frames? Well, if you started using the Internet in the 1990’s, it’s very likely that you’ve already seen a frame layout. During those times, frames were pretty much included in university and vocational courses about IT (Information Technology), Computer Science and other related courses. Frames, basically, is a type of layout in which your website’s front page is divided into several smaller web pages. Each of these separate frames have the properties and functions of a usual web page, only they are "nestled" in one parent web page. Usually, pages that employ this type of layout have multiple scrollbars, and have thick borders. It can be complex-looking, and the coding of this kind of site, especially if you’re going to do it manually, is as complex as that.

But the advantage of frames is the ability for a web master to showcase many different pages of his site all at once. And sometimes, loading time and the interface of the website making use of frames tend to be very user-friendly as the navigation bars tend to stay static, along with the frames holding the banner and other important data. Thus, when the visitor clicks on a link in the navigation bar, only the main page or the frame holding the main content changes and loads - rather than the whole webpage itself.

However, the advantage of frames is also its disadvantage. Since you have the ability to squeeze in as much windows as you can in a single web page, your website has the tendency to look cluttered, heavy and confusing. People often do not where to click, where to look, and how to interpret the data, especially if you’ve coupled your design with tasteless flashing images. Or with the then-popular scrolling marquee text effects that got used and abused for so long.

These were the faults and defects of the frame layout that the new breed of designers (the harbingers of the Web 2.0 platform) deemed the frame layout inappropriate for the rapidly growing web design community. If only they had tools like Sitegrinder then, to remedy the frame layout’s hard and edgy look.

Who knows, though? Some enterprising web designer may just look at the layout and see another thing entirely - that kind of outlook might be able to change the ancient-looking frames into an innovative thing of beauty. If all else fails, there’s always the iFrame to fall back on.

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