trust us, we are professionals!

Occasionally we are asked to do something which we know to be poor internet practice. As we take the medium of the internet seriously we will always let you know if what you are suggesting "makes sense" in respect of the way the internet works.

A classic example is the use of Microsoft® Word™, Excel™ and Powerpoint™ files on the internet.
We would advise against putting these on a site for a number of reasons, including: accessibility, size, and security.

The vexed issue of frames

Frames can be a useful tool if used correctly. Unfortunately there have been so many examples of sloppy use of frames that the whole notion of frames has got a bad reputation. What is more saddening is that much of this sloppy use is perpetrated by many who call themselves web designers and take money off people.

What are frames ?
Frames are a way of showing the content of two or more web pages on a screen at the same time. When frames first became available it was common to have a menu for a site in one frame with the pages of the site appearing in the other frame. However various pitfalls in this strategy soon became apparent..

• when pages were bookmarked it was not always obvious what was being bookmarked, the frame or individual pages within a frame
• if content pages were bookmarked and then accessed directly the site navigation was lost.
  (various javascript ploys were devised to force loading of frames, however these did not always work)
• many people did not provide alternative links for non-frames browsers

For these reasons most designers now avoid using frames unless there is a specific need to do so. Unfortunately many designers are not aware of these lessons, and with a startling degree of ignorance seem to think they don't matter! There especially seems to be a breed of designer who does not care about catering for non-frames browsers.

Why bother about non-frames browsers?
At first thought it would seem reasonable to argue that all modern browsers are capable of displaying frames, so why bother about browsers that are no longer used ? Two good reasons:

1) There are still some people using some of the "old-fashoined" non-frames browsers, and more importantly there are new breeds of browsers that do not handle frames, or do not cope very well - WebTV. Both of these types of browser can use framed pages where provion has been given for non-framed browsers.
Given that for most purposes there is no need to use frames at all, why turn people away from your site ?
2) There are other forms of "browser" that traverse the internet looking at web sites apart from the ones that people use.
We are of course talking about "spiders", "robots" and "crawlers". These are specialised browsers that roam around the internet looking for web sites and trying to navigate around them collecting information that is often stored in the databases used by search engines. These "spiders" can only follow hyperlinks, so if you want your site to be catalogued for search engines to be able link to your site then you need to ensure that you cater for them.