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Designer frames

What is quite inexcusable, and this persists to the modern day, is the sloppy approach to site coding and structuring that use of frames has often encouraged. Frames do not have to be totally unusable and inaccessible - here are some common mistakes and how to fix them.

Here's an example of the sort of website that we still see being built. And we are only exaggerating slightly. Besides being ugly, there are at least four major problems with this 'design'.

The links to the two frames from the top frame set are not identified textually. This means that, in a non-visual browser, they simply appear as 'frame1' and 'frame2', with no hint as to their function.
In browsers (and other web agents) that do not support frames at all, there is no alternative content as an intro to the site. These will just draw a blank.
For those navigating to a particular page from an external link, which could be from a search engine, there is no way of navigating to the other site pages without editing the URL so the site top page is shown.
Because they appear to be invisible within the frame set, these sloppy designers have given all the pages the same title - 'Untitled Document'. (Astonishing how many of these there are on the web - a Google search gives me 4,580,000 instances.) This makes it hard for search engines to index the page - and offers little clue as to the site content for anyone. To confirm this and the preceding point, here's the main content page.

All of these points can be easily corrected. Here is a somewhat better frameset. It's hardly a masterpiece of web design, usability and accessibility, but it is a whole lot more navigable and findable. This shows if we look at the new main content page. Oh - and as a bonus, we have also lost that ugly grey frames border - though it is clear that these guys have a long way to go as designers.

The no-frames content and the accurate naming of the individual frames is not visible unless you read the source code, but if you want to see the difference in action, a text browser like Lynx, which you can download for free, tells it like it is (although Lynx does not display the frame TITLE, many other non-visual browsers do - for Lynx we have also made the frame NAMEs more meaningful, which is a good idea in any case...)

Here are shots of the two framesets in Lynx. Quite a difference.

Frameset in Lynx - before improvements

Before: A very poor showing in Lynx - a text-only browser

After: A few very easy fixes make all the difference