framed sites--how to get the navigation cached?

hi everyone,
i got 50% of visitors entering my site not through the main page. because my site uses frames, when search engines index other pages, they appear in search results without frames. i have of course an option to click "home" where the navigation and top would appear, but i noticed not everyone uses it. so here is the question: is there any way to attach every page of the website to frames?


thanks for your time!

www.iias.nl/asem

An article should be released at SEOChat shortly that discusses this briefly.

But you should include your navigation within each frame, just in case.

But frames suck for so many reasons. If you need them, keep them - if you can work on eliminating them, please do.

yeah i know one's not supposed to have them... but are there better options for extreme amounts of contents?

article on the topic would be good, found it discussed in Google/general section at the seo chat, too.

thanks!:smile:

why would frames be good for 'extreme amounts of contents'?

otherwise it won't be possible to click on any internal page right from the home page - or am i completely wrong? at least one frame - for complex navigation- has to be there, right?

unless one would consider the complex navigation not easy to consume. any better options for sites with a lot of info?

ever hear of content management solutions that use dynamic scripting languages?

PHP, ASP, CFM, JSP, even Perl.

seems like will have to look into them

thanks rustybrick!

For navigation there is no reason for needing frames, for design it can be possible to need frames, to make it look better. You can make all navigation links just on every single page too, it will not take that much space/bandwidth, unless you have menu with a lot of html/text in it.

you know they aren't only bad because of search engines but also usability, i viewed ur site using netscape 6.0 and I couldn't use your navigation. Imagine your site in 4.0?

It also doesn't work in Opera 7! imagine it in 6.0? I would be worrying about your site working properly in all browsers before worrying about the search engines.

And yes google does like w3 compliant websites!

thank you both for remarks!

i guess the incompatibility to some browsers was (one of) the reasons the site is still not included in dmoz. if it is so, will have to consider re-designing. before i start planning that, just one question - - what is w3 compliant website?
but then there is so many framed sites around (and they seem very professional) - how do they get them work in all browsers?

inte w3 is the world standards in html, xhtml, css etc..

what i suggest you do is have a read on compability in all browsers and check w3.org, im sure they will have help for you

You can check whether your site adheres to the published standards at http://validator.w3.org

You will need to add a doctype declaration at the top of your pages though. This needs to go before the html tag in your pages.

There is also a validator at the WDG site, http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ which gives slightly nicer error messages :-)

Remember that just because your document validates doesn't mean it will work in all browsers - all the browsers have various bugs, so you still need to check your site in various browsers.

thanks again ...

just to make sure i picked it up: can check validation with the tools above, but to know for sure you need to actually test in all browsers, right?

while working on the question of how to link 'orphan' pages to frames (well... a temporary solution was needed before we redesign everything...), we inserted this for the main page:

MM_reloadPage(true);
// -->
function makeFrameWork()
{

if (top.location == self.location)
{
top.location.href = "index.html"
}

anyone could tell if google and other SE will consider it spam?

Yes - validation will make sure your code is correct, but it won't guarantee it will show correctly in browsers, because the browsers themselves don't follow the specifications properly.



No - SE don't generally understand Javascript at all, so they will ignore that altogether.

Don't forget that the above is still only a work-around - it won't work for users who have Javascript disabled. As long as it is only a temporary measure, and you still have the text link.

Javascript isn't my forte, but I would think you would have to put that in each page, not just the main page?