Property Website

Accommodating your Audience

Frames: Just Say No.

	Estate Agency Websites
	Web Design Problems
	Web Design Solutions
	Customer Service Issues
	» Too slow » You can't find anything » Navigation » Hosting » Images » Findability » Frames » Flash » Virtual Tours
	Online Estate Agents' Best Practice
	» Benchmarking » Analysing Benchmarks

Navigation does not work with frames since the unit of navigation is different from the unit of view. If users create a bookmark in their browser they may not get the same view back when they follow the bookmark at a later date since the bookmark doesn't include a representation of the state of the frames on the page.

Even worse, URLs stop working: the addressing information shown at the top of the browser no longer constitutes a complete specification of the information shown in the window. If an author copies the URL in order to include it as a hypertext anchor in one of his or her own pages then that anchor will not lead readers to the desired view but to the initial state of the frameset. Similarly, if a user decides to send an email message to a friend with the recommendation to check out a page, then copying the URL from the browser will not work if frames are used since the URL points to the frameset and not to the current view (with the information of interest to the friend). Given that social filtering is one of the most powerful mechanisms for information discovery on the Internet, it is an utter disaster to disable the URL as an addressing mechanism.

Print Problems

Many browsers cannot print framed pages appropriately. Of course, most browsers don't print anything really well, but at least regular pages normally print in full. With frames, it is common to have the print command result in the printing of a single frame. Printing the full page is difficult with scrolling frames: should only the visible part of the frame be printed or should the content be allowed to expand and take up more room than it does on the screen?

Search Problems

Search engines have trouble with frames since they don't know what composites of frames to include as navigation units in their index. They usually index the Meta Tags or Keywords that are on the frameset, ignoring all other pages in your site. Some of them, such as Lycos' spider, summarise Web pages with "this site uses frames but your browser doesn't support them" error messages. Your site is literally invisible to search engines.

User Preferences

Many websites that offer users a choice between regular and framed versions have found that most users prefer frame-free designs.