design question

[Krisstopher981]

Hello friends
I am desiging a site and I asked this other guy for help and he said to use frames before I use Flash, Applets or JavaScripts. What do you guys think? I have a long page that I am using a static menu on but he suggested using frames cause he says it would load quicker. Do you think that is correct?

thanks in advance

[Chung Dha]

It don't matter that much nowadays if it is faster. Only if it the site contain allot of information and allot of people want to find it fast. But often those site got little graphics so it's fast. The amount of pictures are often things that makes the site faster or slower.

If you go for frames go for iframes. Standard frames codes used the whole browser making the site look often odd looking on different resolutions. iframes can be set in table cells which have a bigger avantage. Only problem I encountered is that internet explorer open a new browser if you ad special java/javascript stuff, seem it can't handle that much. However firefox it all works perfect.

[fddesign]

Please, avoid to use frames!!
They aren't standard and they have problems with search engines: the page indexed doesn't have the menu in it, so the visitor coming from a result page could see only the content without the menu.

There are other methods to include the menu in the page

[psyris]

i have to say i agree with fddesign avoid the use of frames as they are non standard.

[bicyclenerd]

It has been a long time since I have used frames, I have used some iFrames nested in a div in recent past... but not for a navigation. It sounds like you want the page to scroll but have the navigation visible while doing so? Like at the top and when the rest of the page scrolls the content will go under the nav? Why not just have the nav scroll with page? I think users are educated enough in web use that they understand to go back to the top or to the nav to go elsewhere. There might be nice way to do it with CSS but I have never looked into something like that. I would look into using flash... Things have come a long way.

[z0rr0]

You can use some kind of "go to top" javascript.

[Uniment1]

Frames are ancient! I would not use them, as has been stated they are not standard and they never look that great.

[q-design]

Frames are a nightmare! Because if Google or any other spider bot catalogue one page directly, maybe the user never see your menu and you lose a user.

Try to use css to do that. With a div fixed at the top of page, you can show everytime your menu.

[onesummer]

I agree with most of what everyone else said, except I'd not necessarily use a "go to top" javascript, as those can be terribly annoying. Just have a textual navigation just like your main navigation at the bottom of every page, that way if the user scrolls down the page they will not have to scroll all the way back to the top. it's a fairly typical practice to do so these days. Just think of yourself as a visitor to your own site, or recall websites that made you happy and made it easy to navigate around their site.

[Chung Dha]

You could also try to make a scrollable content with javascript. But javascript often goes wacky on Internet explorer doing odd stuff and also sometimes in Firefox. Making them to do things you don't want.

Side menu that auto scrolls with you are pretty annoying cause they don't scroll really clean kind of jump around.

Best I think just a botton at the bottom of your page if it is really long with a go to top.

Or just make everything fit on the page so everyone don't to scroll at all.