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ARTICLE: LOOKING THROUGH THE FRAMES / July 21, 1999 When you frame a work of art it becomes more dramatic and more noticeable but when you frame a web page the reverse is often true. Frames are notorious for wreaking all sorts of web page havoc, not the least of which is confusing search engines into cataloguing frame-dependent pages as stand-alone text or worse, bypassing your site altogether. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words and this is certainly true on the web. A framed web site seems to necessitate a thousand words. In reality of course you can compliment your frames with a few dozen well chosen words all in the guise of special HTML tags. Web designers have avoided using frames because older browsers couldn't support them. While this is no longer true frames still continue to be treated as an ugly duckling within the design world for a variety of very legitimate technical reasons. Probably the biggest problem with frames is that the information contained within them can't be bookmarked. This is a huge problem when someone wants to refer to some specific piece of information but can't because the page is contained in a context dependent frame. On the other hand, the elegance of using frames to create an omnipresent toolbar can be a great boon to content heavy pages like online manuals or sites with complex navigation needs. Assuming you've decided that the site specific utility of frames is worth the extra effort you'll want to minimize the technical complications resulting from a casual search-engine-meets-frames encounter. Since one of the main problems with frames is that web spiders won't or can't catalogue the content from embedded pages you'll need to make the master frameset page as informative as possible. This of course brings us back to our old friend the tag. For those of you new to this, the tag belongs within the tag and is read only by certain search engine spiders. The tag allows you to pass along your author name, a brief site description and various keywords amongst other options all of which allows you to convey information about your site even to the spiders that normally ignore framed pages. To learn more about the META tag and other ways of improving your search engine visibility, take a peak at the Web Site Journal Archives and check out the April 28th article, Strengthening Your Search Engine Showing at: http://websitejournal.netscape.com/interview/index.html Another tag designed specifically to address frame handicapped browsers is. Use this tag to provide more detailed information than will fit inside a <META> tag. The way to use the <NOFRAMES> tag is by putting it after the closing </FRAMESET> tag and then writing in whatever information you'd want seen on a frame-free home page. You can nest everything from <BODY><script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-47423994-1', 'fortunecity.ws'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script> <center> <br> <div> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://ad.broadcaststation.net/ads/show_ad.php?width=728&height=90"></script> </div> </center> tags to <P> tags inside the <NOFRAMES> tags, essentially creating a whole second web page. Only very old browsers and search engines (and people Viewing your Source code) will see this text so there's no need to get too fancy. Not only will information inside the <NOFRAMES> tag give search engines something to archive but any links included will be followed which gives you the ability to have subsequent pages catalogued. Since <NOFRAMES> is a paired tag, don't forget to wrap it all up with a final . In contrast to the frame-blind spiders, some search engines catalogue every page with complete disregard to their frame positioning. This probably sounds great until you realize that sites using the ubiquitous frame-dependent navigation toolbar will have stand alone pages archived which won't lead anywhere. Users might arrive at a single page directly from a search result but they won't have any obvious way of getting from that page to the rest of your site because the overall navigation is dependent on loading frameset that the isolated link bypasses. The best way to prevent users from getting stuck on such a virtual desert island is to always include a link to your home page. Of course since we're still talking about frames it's not as straightforward as it seems. The trick is to ensure that such a link includes the target="_top" string within the hyperlink reference. For example, HOME. This target attribute tells the browser to load the new page, in all its framed glory, over the single orphaned page. It's imperative that you include this target attribute. Any link clicked within a frame that doesn't include a target attribute will load within the frame windows. What this means is that although a plain vanilla Home-style tag works well for a user who's arrived at your site without having the proper frame layout loaded, anyone who's entered through the framed front door and clicks a Home link without a target="_top" attribute will end up loading your framed homepage within the frame which will cause an endless, recursive, funhouse hall-of- mirrors effect that might make for a nice art project but isn't exactly good for business. About the Author Heidi Pollock ([email protected]) is a frequent contributor to Web Site Journal and can also be found dispensing her Web site knowledge to the masses on HotWired and iVillage. In her spare time she likes to conjure up images of baklava and wreak havoc on her netizen friends.