FrontPage Templates

[LouiseR]

Hi,

I'm usung FP2000. I wrote my website using the FP nested hierarchy
template. I thought it looked nice but as it used 3 separate frammes,
this caused a big problem when trying to resister with the search
engines. The search engines cannot read text that is inside the frames
ie any of the ontent of any of my pages. So all that was picked up was
my homepage and the three page nems that formed the basis of my frames.

I have rewritten my website to remove all the frames. However I'm not
very happy with the appearance.

Does anyone know of a site for good FP templates that do not use
frames?

Can the spisers sent by the search engines read information that is in
tables or is this a problem too?

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Thanks, louise

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

Table are not a problem with search engine, and really neither are frames, in term of the pages that
load within them being indexed.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
==============================================
If you feel your current issue is a results of installing
a Service Pack or security update, please contact
Microsoft Product Support Services:
http://support.microsoft.com
If the problem can be shown to have been caused by a
security update, then there is usually no charge for the call.
==============================================

 

[LouiseR]

If frames are not the problem, then can you please explain why -. If
your links are all contained within the frame then they are not picked
up. The only way to get around this was to create a Google sitemap and
upload the xml on the Google Sitemapd page. I did this, but it only
solved the problem for Google and not any of the other search engines
that my site has been regisered with.

Once I removed the frames from my site and redid my pages without them
- the pages have started popping up all over the place.

I mentioned my problem to 3 other website owners, one of whom asked
their site designer. They all came back with the same warning - keep
away from frames.

They also said that text that is contained within a table also cannot
be read and for that reason you need to use META TAGS. Is this also
true?

I'm great on the html side of things as I wrote online html help for 6
years. It is al the what you can and can do with respect to the web
that is new to me.

Thanks, Louise

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

It all depends on how your content is reachable from links on your home page. If you had to create a
site map, which is not a bad thing, then it means that the search engines can not crawl your site
just by accessing the home page.

Frames are not a good idea, but not for the reason that you mentioned. The main issue with frames
from a search engine prospective is that the pages the load in a frame, are indexed outside of the
frameset, so when user click on a link to page for your site, the page loads, but not the frameset,
unless you have used JavaScript to generate Dynamic framesets.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
==============================================
If you feel your current issue is a results of installing
a Service Pack or security update, please contact
Microsoft Product Support Services:
http://support.microsoft.com
If the problem can be shown to have been caused by a
security update, then there is usually no charge for the call.
==============================================

 

[LouiseR]

So if I have created a siite map then Google wont crawl from my
homepage, it will only look at the site map?

I created the sitemap after I removed the frames but before I gave the
search engine a chance to look on its own. I assumed that making a
sitemap available might speed things up a bit.

I have links to the main sections of my website on each page down the
left hand side. These are jpgs that are titled button images that link
to the approprite section main pages. Is it liely to cause a problem
that i am linking to a jpg and not to regular text?

Thanks, louise

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

Search engines prefer text links over image links.

See:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html
--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
==============================================
If you feel your current issue is a results of installing
a Service Pack or security update, please contact
Microsoft Product Support Services:
http://support.microsoft.com
If the problem can be shown to have been caused by a
security update, then there is usually no charge for the call.
==============================================

 

[Stefan B Rusynko]

If you use frames (and I don't recommend them for other than SEO reasons), always create your no frames page (say as a text based
site map page)
- but that doesn't eliminate the problems of SE links trying to open your framed pages outside of frames (unless you have built your
frames as dynamic framesets)

Use of normal image linked buttons does not affect SE indexing (but Dhtml type menus might)



| So if I have created a siite map then Google wont crawl from my
| homepage, it will only look at the site map?
|
| I created the sitemap after I removed the frames but before I gave the
| search engine a chance to look on its own. I assumed that making a
| sitemap available might speed things up a bit.
|
| I have links to the main sections of my website on each page down the
| left hand side. These are jpgs that are titled button images that link
| to the approprite section main pages. Is it liely to cause a problem
| that i am linking to a jpg and not to regular text?
|
| Thanks, louise
|