Re: [GENERAL] Re: [MIRRORS] Revamp'd Web Site...

At 20:35 +0300 on 23/7/98, Steve Doliov wrote:

> Having spent about one year on revamping my own site, I am very
> appreciative of the efforts you made. However, I would suggest ditching
> frames if at all possible.
>
> If for no other reason than that frames make it virtually impossible for
> search egines to comprehesively index your site. The search engines will
> now see only the frameset page and whatever keywords you put there.
> search engines like excite ignore keywords entirely because lamers started
> spamming the keywords tag. so search engines like excite won't turn up
> any relebvant info on postgres from your site. bad for publicity.

My own opinion in this issue:

I belong to the pro-frames people. I maintain a site which is frames-based.
I know there is great objection to frames, but I agree with Marc that you
lose almost the same amount of realestate, have to load the same data over
and over, and you have to scroll your entire page when you look for
something in the navigation bar, when you don't use frames.

But I have a few points to make.

* The "back" button's behavior is, in fact, intuitive for most users.
In the begining, Netscape had the "back" return from the entire frame
set and that was very frustrating when all you wanted to do was back
up one operation. They changed this in following navigator versions.
Mostly because MSIE drew better reactions...

* You _can_ bookmark a frameset as well as a frame. If you focus on
one frame, you'll bookmark that specific frame. If you are not focused
on any of the frames, you'll bookmark the whole thing. In order to
revoke focus from all frames, simply click in the "Location" field.

* Although it is tempting, Marc, I strongly advise that you lose the
bottom frame.

Remember that evetually, your pages *will* be searched and encountered
from outside the frames. Therefore you really should have your
copyright notice at the bottom of *each page*. And - very important -
have a link back to the home page, which will give the frustrated
user the context in which to view the page and get more information.

There are utilities which automate the process for you without
resorting to server-side includes and their overhead. After all, this
is a batch operation - stamp all the pages with the same info, and
their own modification dates included as "last modified on". You can
probably write a perl script to do this very quickly - but there *are*
tools (at least for the Mac and Windows) which already have this sort
of thing.

* In order to make life easier on lynx users, older browser users
(there are still people using Netscape 1 today!), and search engines
which don't know how to interpret FRAME tags, you should have a
NOFRAMES section, with links to all the pages and sub pages in your
site.

* Lose the frame borders. Distinguish the frame from the body by background
color. Saves realestate, and very few people bother to resize frames
anyway.

If you want to see an example of all these advices in real life, you can
take a look at my site. It has nothing to do with Postgres, it's just a
hobby. Take a look at it with both Netscape and lynx:
http://www.maccabi.co.il/ - sorry for the self-promotion, but I have no
other example readily available.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma