Despite numerous disadvantages, the use of frames is still very popular. It's no surprise however that the most successful sites on the internet don't use frames.

Frames are unnatural 
User tests show time and again that frames make it harder for users to surf a site. The human eye and brain were not made to deal with frames. Users who scroll expect the whole page to move and not just certain parts of it. Frames disrupt the unity of the page, which slows down the natural reading process. And not only does it take users longer to read the information on the page, it also takes them longer to process that information. However minimal a user's computer experience may be, his natural reflex will be to use the programme's own scroll bar. Because the scroll bar of a browser is on the far right side of the screen, users will turn there when they want to scroll. A lot of sites that use frames disregard the browser's scroll bar and add one or more scroll bars of their own somewhere else on the page, like Supermarket News does.

Frames disrupt the link between url and page 
By using frames, you break the link between the url and the content of the page on the screen. This goes against one of the basic rules of the internet that states that the url in the browser's address bar is the unique address of the page you're looking at. Breaking this link between url and page causes numerous problems. For one thing, the user can't use the url to see where he is on the site, as is the case on the site of Seghers Group. Quite often it is also impossible to bookmark, e-mail or copy the url of a framed page. Considering these are all viral marketing tools that are important factors in a site's success, it seems silly to make it impossible for users to make use of them. Another important problem users often have with frames is that they can't print a page that uses frames. Users don't know that what they see on the screen is in fact not one page but a combination of different pages and they haven't a clue why the page on the screen is different than the page that comes out of the printer.

Frames limit your audience 
Few web builders seem to realise that by using frames they exclude a number of users. The argument that older browsers can't handle frames may not be true any more, the fact remains that sites that use frames are unreadable and unmanageable on smaller screens (PDA, mobile, ...) and specific appliances (set-top boxes). Another argument that is not to be overlooked is that frames mess up the screen readers of users with visual disabilities. Regardless of the fact that a number of search engines are simply incapable of indexing sites that use frames, it is important to know that there is not one search engine that takes a frameset into account. If users enter the Irish BMW site via a search engine, chances are they are sent to a page like http://www.bmw.ie/Services/Dealers/Dealers.html. A missed opportunity because these users don't get to see the navigation and therefore don't get the chance to surf the rest of the site.

Web builders' less than convincing arguments
Despite all of these downsides, a lot of web builders still stubbornly defend the use of frames. Their arguments are less than convincing. An often-argumented point is that frames make it easier to make changes to the navigation of a site because it's in a separate frameset. They seem to conveniently forget that the use of an include has all the advantages of a frameset and is a far more elegant solution. Claiming pages load faster because the navigation doesn't need to be downloaded every time doesn't make sense either. Because graphical elements are in the browser cache anyway, the maximum delay would be about half a second. Another argument is that they use frames to stop the navigation from disappearing from the user's view. However, usability tests show that users never complain about a navigation that drops out of sight. As long as the navigation is present on every page, users don't mind it is not always visible.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis

A more in depth version of this article will soon appear in Tips & Advies Online Ondernemen.