Frames

[willwest]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using frames or inline frames in web site layouts?

For example, I vaguely recall various sources advising against using frames in recent years. One of the reasons given in the past was search engine spiders allegedly do not crawl well through sites using frames. Does that advice still hold true today?

[robin]

People do still say that...

Most people who create framed sites do make the mistake of making it impossible for spiders to crawl.

But there are ways to make it easy for the crawlers and if it's done right they'll crawl every single page that you can make and upload.

I've got a game page on a mainstream site that has to have frames because I'm using an affiliate template of their top web games -- it does just fine.

Several years back I did the SE work for a BDSM toy store that was using frames. It did excellent! Too bad the owners were goofs and let their biz die.

I've got a link somewhere that will show you how to set up a frames site for the engines.

[robin]

Here we go, here's a page with the basics of setting up a SE friendly frames site: http://www.highrankings.com/framedsite.htm

[willwest]

Thanks Robin. Your words of encouragement and resource link are very helpful regarding frames.

[robin]

No prob -- you're welcome.

[willwest]

Thanks, Robin, for your encouraging words and resources. My partner, Chad Adams, converted two of our sites to frames layouts recently. These sites now download faster and are easier to navigate for end users. Plus frames allow us to perform frequent updates faster and easier. Hopefully our attempts to make them search engine friendly will be successful.

You are invited to visit our revised sites at QueerWhiteTrash.com and NaughtyFlirt.com. Since these are our first two frames experiments, they are work in progress of course. Your feedback is welcome.

[robin]

Hey Willwest,

Gotta luv it when your sites download faster are easier to navigate and you're able to update them easier!

If you're able to make them search friendly then excellent.

I've just bookmarked all the sites and I'll have a look at them when I get back tommorow.

I know I've been to at least two of them before. Actually, I think those would be the ones that I've got in me little search engine...

Gotta run -- but I'm glad that this is working out for you.

[robin]

Hi there again Willwest,

Just got back from the weekend. I see you've been busy!

Just a thought on Queer White Trash -- specifically this page: http://www.queerwhitetrash.com/TrailerHome.html

On the navigation frame I can see down as far as "RV Video Store". I know though that there's a bunch more links further on down. "Queer Arcade", "Prickly Pear Map", "Bathhouse Bang", and more....

You might want to make that frame scrollable. I know, it won't look as nice but I think if you do a slight adjustment on the size of either your navigation frame and/or your main.htm frame; it should all work out.

Here's some code that you may find usefull:

<script language="JavaScript">
<!-- begin
if (parent.location.href == self.location.href) {
// change the url below to the url of the
// frameset page...
window.location.href = 'http://yoursite.com/yourpage.html';
}
//  end -->
</script>

Just remember to pay attention when you're editing your framed pages; if you use this script.

This would come in handy, if a search engine indexed your navigation frame and people were landing on that page instead of say, this page: http://www.queerwhitetrash.com/TrailerHome.html

Oh yes....

window.location.href = 'yourpage.html';

instead of the full domain and path should work too.

Haha! Sorry dude but your simple little question has me on a roll.

Take care -- have fun with your re-vamped sites.

[desslock]

Will:

Hey you and Chad have really been going whole hog at sprucing up your sites! I just checked out QueerWhiteTrash. I hadn't looked at your sites in a number of months. Great improvements... and great content!

It all looks a lot less cluttered. Hot butts.... all good stuff. I dunno though about the FRAMEs. I stay away from frames like a vampire to garlic. Robin's workarounds using NOFRAMES look ok but I'm skeptical.

To get ranked in the search engines, as a rule of thumb you want to write. Spiders are not hungry for websites, they are hungry for words and links. You have hit some of that pretty well. I somehow wandered into Redneck Ranch which is chok-full of verbiage about Jesse O'Toole. ( btw, friskyfans has the #1 google ranking for Jesse O'Toole :fire: )

Here's my experience with SEO: Basically as far as website layout - you want to have as few subdivisions as possible. In other words, you don't want chadisbad.com/dir/subdir1/subdir2/etc.... I very rarely go beyond a mysite.com/dir/thispage.htm level.

So it would go like this: At the front have your 2257 warning page, and link that to your main page. From your main page, branch off to your areas. Be sure to link back....*have all your inside pages link back to your main page.* This will increase the weight of your main page with the search engines. It will score higher that way. Plus at the end of the day, your readers will be navigating it better; less chance to get lost.

When I went to ChadIsBad4u (and i unfortunately still don't know how bad) this was my journey: I first saw your 2257 page. I clicked and got the main page. Then I clicked SWALLOW. Here for some reason I got another warning page...which afterwards took me to the SWALLOW department. I'm not a lawyer, but if you don't have to have it, then don't. That second 2257 warning page will shield stuff beyond it from getting spidered properly.

One last minor SEO point: That section I selected was labeled "SWALLOW" --- consider changing that. Your audience will not go to google and type in "swallow" --- When you name your links, sections and pages, a lot of the time you have to think like a search engine. You have to be real explicit. For me, I imagine that I'm trying to give directions to Commander Data.

I'd wager that a better name for that <A>anchor tag would be "cumeating."

Then on the inside pages of that section you want to <TITLE> your pages with "cumeating" , or other relevent search terms. All that will add to your pages' weights specifically on the search terms you seek. Am I being too esoteric? If so, sorry.... it's late and i just ate a lot of Italian Cream Cake.

All in all, that's just some stuff I've picked up in the trenches. Do whatever works for you, by all means. I hope it helps.

Steve

[willwest]

Thanks, Steve, for your helpful comments and suggestions. We are doing some of that already and just need to fine tune it some more.

[Xstr8guy]

Wow! Chad is becoming quite the site designer. I love his sense of humor, too.

A couple of things I noticed...

I think Robin touched on this, but the left hand menu should scroll. Monitors with low resolutions will not see the entire menu.

I would avoid having too many frames. QWT has 4 frames... imo, the same could be done with 2... 1 for the menu and 1 for the content. The title and the bottom navigation/legal notice could be integrated into each content page and add very little additional load time. When you have so many frames, the chance of the site breaking out of the frames or nesting repeatedly is much higher.

I would make the menu links text rather than images. If I have images or flash as navigation, I always duplicate it with text. SE's give more weight to links that have context.


I see Chad is using GayPassport. How is it working out for you guys? I haven't used them in a long time and am curious if they are doing well for you.