Over the past few years I have noticed a lot of web site designers who use frames.
The main reason why is because it makes a website very simple and easy for the designer to update, as they only
need to update the navigation in one file..
This idea is all well and good but there are some major issues with using this form of system for designing
websites..
The main issue is that search engines can not index your site properly, they only index the contents of the
left frame. This means that you can place all the content that you like in the body of your website but the
Google Robots will not find it.. Nor will any of the other major search engines.
This means that there is less chance of your site being listed very highly in the search engine results, as the
majority of your content is hidden... Due to the fact that the engines do not rely on meta tags for the index
of web pages, it means that if you forget to include them in your entirely frames based site that your pages
will be largely unable to be found by people who need the information that you are providing.
So you may be asking what you can use instead of frames.
You could either style your pages using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Or if you do not want to use CSS then a
simple two column table works quite well, you just place the navigation bar, all the links in the left column
and use the column on the right to place the rest of your content.
Both of these methods work well and are easily accessed by search engines.
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