Recently I have come into contact with several clients with existing frame based web sites. The comments are sadly quite predictable, and usually along the lines of "it just doesn't seem to do anything".

What they were referring to was that their web site was not attracting significant search engine traffic. Essentially, the reason is that their web sites are not visible to search engine spiders. In fact any content past the first page is generally not indexed at all. Needless to say this all but cripples the web site.

The fundamental problem is there is no standard way of creating a URL (web address) that specifies which pages to load into a particular frameset. This has a couple important consequences for your frame based website:

• Web search engines do not index framed sites. Search engines (like AltaVista, Google, etc) will stop indexing your site as soon as they run into a frameset. The only pages to get indexed are the default pages loaded into your frameset (i.e. your "home page"). The rest of your site is ignored.

• Visitors can only bookmark the home page. This is because the address in the web browser window does not indicate which pages are currently loaded into the frames of your frameset, when a visitor thinks they are bookmarking a specific page of interest, they are typically just bookmarking the home (frameset) page.

In summary, this is why TOSD does not design web sites with framesets! Making life hard for search engines is in nobody's best interests - particularly the site owner who is desperately trying to increase their traffic.