I would like to know your opinion about building a website design with frames or building the same design without frames...

In other words, which are the pros and cons you find in the two ways... I like frames but most of the pages (comercial and personal) don't incorpore them even if their design would fit equally good in frames and in an easier way in that you havent to put all the code in the same document page.

What would you recommend?

Most people do not use frames because when someone will link to a page that uses frames, that page will not have the navigation frame, or the header frame on it.

That is the main reason why, so I would strongly suggest you do not use frames if you plan on getting hits from the search engine.

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Mr. Bob's Web Design - Tirelessly looking for ways to enhance the customer base of your business.

Hello sho,

Recommend? Like Bobby said, nowadays getting each of your pages indexed inside the popular Search Engines is the No.1 priority for most site owners.

Frames complicate things when you take this into consideration; you can get your individual pages (off your framed web site) into the Search Engines but it requires some extra effort. Then if the Search Engine bots DO manage to crawl every page off your website despite the pages being served off a framed layout, then there's the traffic coming straight to the individual pages (which then means you have to insert some funky JavaScript code to check and get the frames back in order).

Nowadays, site owners in general, prefer to use server-side includes to insert snippets off their web page that change very rarely from page to page (like the top banner and navigation bar etc.).

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Thanks for your response...

In the past i have used frames to hold the menus and used a javascript to put back the frames if the visitors enter into an inner frame... that way i used to solve the problems...

This thread was because am thinking in building a page but didnt know about using frames or not...

BTW what are server-side includes and which of them do you recommend to me if i want them for a menu or like that??

You dont need server side includes for a menu.

You can do a search for "Navigation Menu" or "Javascript menu", or take a look at www.dynamicdrive.com

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Mr. Bob's Web Design - Tirelessly looking for ways to enhance the customer base of your business.

If you're in a rush to get this new site out then always go with what you know... if you know frames, then do that! But, if you are doing this at a comfortable pace and wouldn't mind experimenting with something new, then take the frameless approach and figure out the simplest method to use server-side includes.

There are many options to do server-side includes. I remember when I first started out with this whole web design thingy, I created a site on Tripod.com. They didn't offer any server-side scripting support, they still don't if I am not mistaken. However, they did enable FrontPage Server Extensions on thier server. So for a while there I was using that FrontPage Web Bots (I think that's what they were called) and simply included (rarely changing) fragments of my html into the rest of my web pages. see an old article I wrote about it: http://www.desilva.biz/fpage/fpincludes.html

Server-side scripting support can be anything that allows you to manipulate web pages (/ the HTML markup) dynamically. This can be perl (CGI) / PHP / ASP / JSP and quite a few others. Most hosts nowadays (the *nix camp, at least) offer PHP support like it's part of the OS, so it's a good choice to start.

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

If you want a frames effect you can always css and includes to create a 'frames' looking site. (ie main body/menu/whatever scrolling whilst everything else is static) Plus you dont have all the problems that go with frames.

thanks that was what i wanted to know... am taking the frameless aproach since i got some time to experiment...

am taking the basic client-side scripting, like css, first to do that and i hope i can use the server-side then...

what would you recommend to learn first about the second one??? perl, php, asp...??

IMO php is the best
Plus there are lots of help, scripts, tutorials etc on the web to help you learn and develop. (plus JdS )

Since I have already noticed your contributions in the C/C++ forums here, I must suggest that you go with PHP...

Both PHP and MySQL (database server) are written in C (or C++, can't remember now) and so the syntax and language structure is very similar. PLUS, if you know C well, and you start to push your limits with PHP (and MySQL) you can even contemplate extending them by using your own user defined functions (which are of course written in C)!

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J de Silva
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