Re: [GENERAL] Re: [MIRRORS] Revamp'd Web Site... - Mailing list pgsql-general

At 20:35 +0300 on 23/7/98, Steve Doliov wrote:


> Having spent about one year on revamping my own site, I am very
> appreciative of the efforts you made.  However, I would suggest ditching
> frames if at all possible.
>
> If for no other reason than that frames make it virtually impossible for
> search egines to comprehesively index your site.  The search engines will
> now see only the frameset page and whatever keywords you put there.
> search engines like excite ignore keywords entirely because lamers started
> spamming the keywords tag.  so search engines like excite won't turn up
> any relebvant info on postgres from your site.  bad for publicity.

My own opinion in this issue:

I belong to the pro-frames people. I maintain a site which is frames-based.
I know there is great objection to frames, but I agree with Marc that you
lose almost the same amount of realestate, have to load the same data over
and over, and you have to scroll your entire page when you look for
something in the navigation bar, when you don't use frames.

But I have a few points to make.

* The "back" button's behavior is, in fact, intuitive for most users.
  In the begining, Netscape had the "back" return from the entire frame
  set and that was very frustrating when all you wanted to do was back
  up one operation. They changed this in following navigator versions.
  Mostly because MSIE drew better reactions...

* You _can_ bookmark a frameset as well as a frame. If you focus on
  one frame, you'll bookmark that specific frame. If you are not focused
  on any of the frames, you'll bookmark the whole thing. In order to
  revoke focus from all frames, simply click in the "Location" field.

* Although it is tempting, Marc, I strongly advise that you lose the
  bottom frame.

  Remember that evetually, your pages *will* be searched and encountered
  from outside the frames. Therefore you really should have your
  copyright notice at the bottom of *each page*. And - very important -
  have a link back to the home page, which will give the frustrated
  user the context in which to view the page and get more information.

  There are utilities which automate the process for you without
  resorting to server-side includes and their overhead. After all, this
  is a batch operation - stamp all the pages with the same info, and
  their own modification dates included as "last modified on". You can
  probably write a perl script to do this very quickly - but there *are*
  tools (at least for the Mac and Windows) which already have this sort
  of thing.

* In order to make life easier on lynx users, older browser users
  (there are still people using Netscape 1 today!), and search engines
  which don't know how to interpret FRAME tags, you should have a
  NOFRAMES section, with links to all the pages and sub pages in your
  site.

* Lose the frame borders. Distinguish the frame from the body by background
  color. Saves realestate, and very few people bother to resize frames
  anyway.

If you want to see an example of all these advices in real life, you can
take a look at my site. It has nothing to do with Postgres, it's just a
hobby. Take a look at it with both Netscape and lynx:
http://www.maccabi.co.il/ - sorry for the self-promotion, but I have no
other example readily available.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma