Orphaned Pages:
BBB Bike Parts
reviewed Dec. 29, 2006
If you arrive at a
page inside BBB Bike Parts' website from a search
engine, you won't be able to navigate to any other page
within the site. That's because there are no links on
the page you land on. And that's because the site uses an
ancient, largely discredited website technology: frames.
In fact, the problem this website suffers is one of
the main reasons that web designers abandoned frames, way
back in the 90's. Frames can easily cause serious
problems for users.
Frames are one way for webmasters because they provide an
easy way to have the same elements on every "page", such as
the same logo or menus. The way they work is that they
assemble two or more pages into the same window. One page
could contain the menus, which could be combined with
whatever page the user is looking at.
One way this breaks down is with the example above: The
search engines have no way to show a page with the frame
page that's supposed to come with it. So users get the naked
product page without the accompanying logo or menus. And
they're stuck.
I came across this site when I was searching for one of
their products, called the NightBeam. I searched Google for
"bbb nightbeam" and their page was the first hit. I clicked
it and immediately found myself on an orphaned page, with no
way to click to the rest of the website.
Orphaned pages aren't the only problem caused by frames.
Even when a user does enter from the front page and gets all
the frames as they go through the site, they have another
problem: The address bar never changes. That means it's
impossible for the user to bookmark that page, copy the
address to link to it from another site, or send it to a
friend or colleague.
There are clunky Javascript scripts which will force
frames onto a page when a user lands on an orphaned page,
and even cumbersome ways to get the address bar to show a
proper url that can actually be bookmarked, copied, and
linked to. But these are a lot of work, and they still
provide for a bad user experience, as the first thing the
user sees when they go to an orphaned page is the page
disappearing and then redirecting to a frameset so the whole
frame can be drawn. If the idea of using frames was to have
the some same content throughout the site in order to save
time, then grafting clunky Javascript code into each and
every page certainly defeats the purpose.
Of course, there are some cases in which frames can be
put to good use, but they're definitely the rare exception
and not the rule.
How BBB Bike Parts can fix this
problem
The preferred method for reusing content on
every page of a site is to use SSI (server-side
includes). BBB could use SSI and get rid of the frames.
It could also add a bunch of clunky Javascript, but
simply using SSI is the preferred solution.
Update, Nov. 2007:
I went back to check to see if BBB had fixed the
problem yet, and discovered that the original page I
linked to was gone! Evidently they no longer make
that product, so they unceremoniously removed the whole
page from their website. But that causes even more
problems. First, customers sometimes like to look up
information even about discontinued products, and now
they can't.
Second, since BBB just removed the page without
redirecting it, anyone who clicks a link to that page
will get a big ugly "Page not found" error. If BBB really
felt they didn't want to offer information about their
old products any more, they should at least have
redirected visitors to the home page so that users don't
end up at a "Page not found" dead end.
|
