In the last several years, sites with frames have been slowly burned at the stake by SEO's. Redesigned, converted, noframed, and removed in order to accomodate a better design that will do well in the search engine. For the most part many of the techniques used to fix frames in the past are as not much more effective than the frames themselves. Adding links and content in the noframe section is not often a good solution and only a temporary patch at best. In most cases the best advice is to just not use frames period. I wanted to highlight a good advanced search engine optimization technique for fixing frames on websites. This technique is actually more a way to preserve the layout using frames while redoing all the code work. I came across a good example of it yesterday as I was examining some excellent CSS resources from a post on Cre8asite Forums. If you have clients or yourself want to keep the benefits of frames but not have the negative side effects there is a very good solution.

Fix Frames with a CSS Layout

Some brilliant people have taken the time to do a few examples of this (below). Basically the trick is to work with the z-index and the images in the CSS. You tell it to have the content layer scroll over the shadows but under the main image. The benefits are: You get a fixed navigation and top header and scrolling main body. The code is super clean as all styles are in the CSS. Its works in IE6 and all other browsers (except IE5.x).

Here are two examples:
http://www.stunicholls.myby.co.uk/layouts/frame.html - you can grab the CSS here by doing a view source.

http://jfy.homeunix.net/misc/example.html - another good and clean example of it in use in the backend of an administration section. See the source.

http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial24/ - very thorough resource for creating this type of layout

This technique can be adapted in many ways for the use with a redesign. Its especially wonderful SEO benefits are paralleled with the benefits it can have conversions and design. Check it out.

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