HELP! Frames & FrontPage!

[NikkiPierce]

HI everyone!
First off I am "self-taught" with FrontPage, so no making fun of me
Okay....I had my web page pretty much done & in working order. Until I came across "frames" this morning. I got the bright idea of trying it on my web page!
I got it laid out on the computer...looking good....I liked it! So, I "publish" it!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.............now I have a very messed up web page that only has 2 duplicate "frames" and not the rest of my "index" / "main" page.
Can anyone help or am I going to have to scrap the frame idea???
If you can help...thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

[kyle422]

Why not post your code here for use to check out.

[NikkiPierce]

The code of both the frame & the "main" body page? Sorry for being so ignorant.

[kyle422]

I checked your homepage and now see what your saying. I have some advice.
First off, don't use frames unless absolutely necessary. Most of the time, search engines can't read anything within a frame. You want search engines to spider your pages so if someone types in a search for "spring hill real estate" and you have properly SEO'd your homepage, your site has the potential to have good placement/rank. Read this article: SEO tutorial
It should help you to understand some things about onpage SEO and offpage SEO.
Next, hang out here and learn some techniques we all use to dominate search engines. I have only been doing websites and SEO since October of last year and learned almost everything on this forum. Feel free to ask questions. WE are all here to help.

[RobertD]

Frames have a lot of coding issues plus they rarely look good. So unless you consider yourself a highly skilled designer/developer, never use frames for a public website.

[myrealtyfeed]

Nice-looking design. Never would have guessed it for a Frontpage site. I noticed your 'read more' links on the properties aren't working. Hope you get the frames issue straightened out.

[pcdoc]

Ditch the frames, learn CSS.

http://www.csszengarden.com/

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

google search for 'css'

[SEO Jason]

Frames have a lot of coding issues plus they rarely look good. So unless you consider yourself a highly skilled designer/developer, never use frames for a public website.

a highly skilled designer/developer wouldn't use frames, they'd use css. lol.

Learn css, avoid frames.

Try using Dreamweaver if you can and avoid Frontpage. Generally frontpage creates too much unnecessary code. I believe you can download a trial version of Dreamweaver from their website. Try that and I don't think that you will go back.

Dreamweaver is great for the split views between code and design and being able to see how what you do in the design affects the code.

[Homesurfer]

Like I said in another thread, I have to learn Dreamweaver pretty soon because that is what I am going to use on HomeSurfer.com. But www.realestateabc.com was entirely created with FrontPage and it does pretty well with search engines.

And thanks for those links on CSS, especially the W3 link.

However, to answer the original question -- when I was using FrontPage and exploring frames (type "real estate calculators" into Google and my framed page comes up number one - so frames aren't ALWAYS a bad thing)....what I did was import an already existing framed page to my FrontPage program, just so I could see how it worked.

Then you have to be very careful to go through and remove the HTML, metatags, and so on from ALL THREE of the pages -- the navigation frame, the viewing frame AND the page name that designates them both together. That way you end up with blank pages and you can input your own HTML, metatags, and content. All you really "borrowed" was how to create a framed page properly. Then you can use that knowledge to create them on your own.

Since you are self-taught, as I am and most FrontPage users are -- that is one way you learn. You "import" a page so you can see how it is put together. But if you publish it and keep someone else's tags in there, even accidentally, you will get reamed eventually -- and rightfully so.

Actually, you already know some of this, because some of the code on your pages comes from Advanced Access.

As for the criticsim about framed pages, it isn't usually aimed at the "initial" framed page. However, if someone clicks on something in the navigation frame so that the page changes within the viewing frame, you will notice that the page address in the address bar at the top of your browser probably remains the same. Well, the same thing happens when your site gets spidered. Sometimes the spider only "senses" what appears in the address bar, not the actual page that appears in the viewing frame.

That isn't necessarily ALWAYS true, but it is true enough that framed pages get a lot of criticism. From my point of view, though -- with my calculator page -- I only care about that initial page, not the subseqsequent pages.

As a result, regardless of the criticism -- there are times when frames can be useful.

[SEO Jason]

Hmmm, thought I would just add on that despite rumours to the contrary, framed pages can become cached and can be spidered. They just have to be setup properly and in my experience they seem to take longer to be cached and get cached less frequently.

You can achieve the same thing you can with frames by using css and it's much more seaerch engine friendly.

realestateabc - I originally learned just using notepad, but didn't really learn much, just enough to make a basic page(most of my early sites were framed) than i stopped making websites for a few years. When i came back i had forgotten what i did know and so i started out using frontpage. Although it did create superfluous code and sites create with frontpage can do well in the search engines, I believe that dreamweaver is the tool to use to take your designing and website creation to a new, higher level. When i switched i found it way easier to do a lot more than i could with frontpage.