"Kent Feiler" asked some questions about frames and tables...
Hey, Kent. Some guys in the newsgroup here tend to come
across pretty hard as far as HTML, CSS and other things
go.
Frames works well in some cases. I personally prefer to
avoid them myself, but one of the better websites I've run
across, that doesn't have any problems with Frames and
search engines is...
http://vbnet.mvps.org/
In fact, the advantage there, is that there's only one page
for the search engine to establish a pagerank for (google
specific). Google however does a great job of indexing
the underlying webcontent.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avbnet.mvps.org
However, each framed page gets it's own DOCTYPE tag,
<headtags, <metatags, and <bodytags. In fact, that's
the ONLY right way to do it. Create the content so if a
browser looks at a particular framed page, then the browser
gets the full content of that page. No need to put keywords
in the meta tags, just a language meta tag is all that's required.
Then use a common CSS <linktag to identify a common
CSS code page so everything gets a uniformed and well-ad-
justed configuration.
I took a look at your own pages and noticed a few problems
with images not getting displayed and such. Also, the textured
background comes across really thick making the text hard to
read.
The guys that create
http://www.csszengarden.com/ are pro-
fessional artists. Very few folks have such creative abilities.
But nonetheless, I like alot of the designs they present and I
go through some of their webpages every so often to gather
ideas.
One problem with Frames, is that they present themselves
rather slowly sometimes...
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile...202.css&page=0
While that's a very nice design it makes me feel like I'll never
get a computer fast enough to view the contents of that page
with confidence.
I personally identify a really nice design by the way it looks
when the browser opens up in a full window and what it looks
like when the window shrinks to an 800x600 resolution...
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile...170.css&page=3
One of my favorite designs, Bonsai Sky by Mike Davidson...
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile...69.css&page=16
And the amazing thing is that it looks good in both a Mozilla web
browser and in Internet Explorer, although for some odd reason
Internet Explorer (6) loses the Windowed edge. Nonetheless it
still looks great when displayed at a large resolution and at the
800x600 and smaller resolutions.
Anyways, that kind of stuff is for artsy folks who know how to
create images and design around such images.
Personally, I don't like frames much at all and I won't build a
site with frames.
As far as changing the content of pages, some tools help when
doing mass changes. FrontPage works, but it takes some time
getting to learn about it's quirks. The other tools, like the Unix
tools (sed, grep and other command line tools) each require
learning how to use them.
Learning CSS takes some time. I still learn after doing it for the
10 years. Sometimes it's relearning things.
Anyways, as far as frames go, make sure the framed content
can stand alone and you'll be good. Make sure you use a
common CSS file to keep a consistent layout. Build your pages
to be visually stimulating, easily readable (as some people are
sight impaired, meaning certain colors might look reversed, and
sometimes certain colors - as in reg/green color blindness look
the same). If your background color is light, make sure your
foreground color is dark (or vice versa).
Good luck.
--
Jim Carlock
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