Web design question: frames?

[gusmahler]

I'm part of a committee to redesign a website for my daughter's school. The current site uses frames. I was under the impression that no one used frames anymore. I googled the subject and all I could find were old (5+ years old) articles that said frames were bad. Since there isn't a single site that I regularly visit that uses frames, I would assume that the "frames are bad" belief is pretty widespread.

But is that accurate? Or is it just that the sites I normally visit that don't use frames?

Also, what reasons can I give the committee to get rid of the frames other than "nobody uses them."

[Freakin]

frames are bad.

frames fundamentally break the concept of the web, which is a bunch of URLs for a bunch of webpages. It tries to mash all the webpages together in one big frameset, which wreaks havoc on browsing.


frames are generally bad for bookmarks & search, as well as printing.

Frames are not usually handicapped accessible because the reading programs still can't effectively read between the pages.

generally a SEO site and a frames site are mutually exclusive. Search engines index hte main site and can't find or categorize the subpages properly. at this point subpages would be indexed a lot and users hitting subpages could be stuck at a part of the site that they can't effectively navigate out of (it usually lacks the primary navigation mechanism the website was built around).

frames can also be harder to maintain if they are not being maintained by the guy who developed them. It can become a confusing jumble of subpages and targets that are generally not documented or explained.


basically frames were a poor way to handle the navigation problems that users were experiencing in the 90's when netscape introduced them.

How about you tell the schoolboard that Netscape introduced frames as a solution to the navigational problems on websites in the mid-90's and dropped frames from their own website in less than 6-months because they caused more problems than they solved. They are either unnecessary for a page, or are used because the organization does not want to pay to get a page properly coded and had a mickey-mouse solution thrown together by a second-rate designer.

[gusmahler]

Thanks for your comments. Unfortunately, the website is run by Campus Grid. Looks like they tout frames as an integral feature of their services. Their site is terribly designed and violates so many rules of Web Pages That Suck that I guess it should not be surprising that they force frames on the users. (e.g., the website features section is completely in Flash, with slow loading text.

[Freakin]

Are they going to handle the redesign of the site?

Tell the committee that using frames in today's web is like doing open heart surgery when you could have done it laproscopically instead. They both may get the job done, but forcing frames on a user is clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her back to your cave instead of buying her a nice dinner & wine.


Seriously looking over those websites in Campus Grid's portfolio I would have guessed they were built by a high school student for a class project instead of by a paid company. Not only is it coded ghetto-style (with frames) but the actual design of most of the sites is pretty ugly too.

[gusmahler]

[ QUOTE ]
Are they going to handle the redesign of the site?

Tell the committee that using frames in today's web is like doing open heart surgery when you could have done it laproscopically instead. They both may get the job done, but forcing frames on a user is clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her back to your cave instead of buying her a nice dinner & wine.


Seriously looking over those websites in Campus Grid's portfolio I would have guessed they were built by a high school student for a class project instead of by a paid company. Not only is it coded ghetto-style (with frames) but the actual design of most of the sites is pretty ugly too.

[/ QUOTE ]

I completely agree. One of pages on the long, slow-loading flash page shows how you can customize the page and aren't limited to the template. But what it shows is a professionally designed page that is loaded in a frame. It also touts the ability to directly launch a PDF, which is an atrocious thing to do in a website. (Much better to have a link to the PDF.)

CampusGrid seems like it was launched a long time ago, but the entire school district uses it. It's expensive ($599 for a whole school district? How much would that cost at Godaddy.com?) and, because it's old, the templates look like crap. However, the templates are supposedly easy to change.

It's funny because I was compiling my list of complaints about the current website, but it seems that many of my complaints are touted as "features" by campusgrid.

[RodeoBlue]

Frames main functions were made obsolete with the use of virtual includes.

[Freakin]

[ QUOTE ]
Frames main functions were made obsolete with the use of virtual includes.

[/ QUOTE ]

bingo. PHP=no reason for frames (as they are commonly used)

[gusmahler]

[ QUOTE ]
Seriously looking over those websites in Campus Grid's portfolio I would have guessed they were built by a high school student for a class project instead of by a paid company.

[/ QUOTE ]
They are. Campus grid does no actual web design beyond supplying the schools with the templates and provide the hosting. The actual content is provided by the schools. For elementary schools, that means parents. For high schools, they can pawn it off on the students.

As for Campus Grid, it's a rip off. $599 per year for a school district! And you only get 50 MB per school! You can get a godaddy.com hosted site for $43/year that gives you 5 GB.

They cite this site as being "an excellent site." However, the pages are atrocious. If you go to Dad's club, you'll see at least 3 completely different layouts, including a frame within a frame: http://rhs.ousd.ca.campusgrid.net/ho...Club/AVProject

[Freakin]

I'd seriously be embarrassed as a member of whoever chose campus grid to begin with that they got duped into using them.

The price is 10 times what it should be and the quality is 1/20th of what it should be.

[erbbysam]

good lord somebody is stuck in the 90's @ campus grid. From my understanding, modern web pages run off of css style sheets and tags to make pages almost appear to have frames which don't. (you can see my HS senior design project from last winter where I created http://www.icanimate.com using this technique(similar to youtube)).
The only time that frames should ever be used these days in when compaines/institutions can't afford to switch over all of their content to modern w3c standards:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...d.com/fees.php -tells you something about this company

I was on my HS committee for recommending web based technologies and we ended up recommending Edline:
https://www.edline.net/
I would recommend personally but from my understanding it did end up being a bit pricey and was really only meant for contacting students/parents.