Website Design Tips

Why this is Important

Some browsers still in use do not support frames. And other people just plain don't like them, or have computers that tend to crash on frames websites. Another consideration is that if one of your inside pages is listed in a search engine, and it does not have a link to your site map or index page, then a visitor who surfs in from that search engine will not see any of the rest of your site. And search engines don't normally list frameset pages at all.

How to Fix It

If you have a non-frames index.html page, in most cases you can create a no-frames version of your frames website rather easily. Just make one page that is a table of contents or site map, and then make sure each of your actual content pages has a link at the bottom to that site map page. Then you can use the same content pages for both frames and no-frames versions.

In most cases, two frames showing at a time are plenty - a main frame plus a navigation frame. Sometimes three is better, but it is extremely rare for four frames at once to be better than fewer. Too many frames make your layout look "busy".

It is a good idea to test a frames website at 640x480 resolution. Frames that look great at 800x600 resolution are often impossible at 640x480. Frames that look good at 640x480 will still look good at larger resolutions. You can do this by altering the settings on your video driver or by resizing your browser window to 640x480.

For more information see the HTML Goodies Tutorial on Frames or Gilpo's Frames Tutorial.

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