Adam Perfect

General

Frames live?

As I mentioned in my previous post, at work we're moving a lot of clients to new hosting. Due to a very silly system at the old hosts, that means we have to transfer the domain names to a new registrar as well as they won't let us just point at another host's servers. We're using 123-Reg to transfer the domains to, and today I logged in to find a new site design. It's quite a pleasant design, but what really got me is that it still uses frames. The layout is such that frames aren't even a natural thing to use. It looks like what's happened though, is that while their front-end site has been re-designed in nice tableless code with CSS to handle presentation as should be, the back-end domain management area isn't so easy to re-code/-style. So they stuck it in a frame. I'm hoping that is the reason and that they're working on doing the management area properly, because if they've actually chosen to use frames on a fresh build, especially with the new layout they've used, it's madness. It does (hopefully) drive home the point about writing semantic, valid code though. If the original site was written semantically, they could just write a new stylesheet and have their new design implemented much more easily and quickly (aside from any actual content/functionality changes of course). 123-Reg have made a good step forward with their new site, the main 'sales' part being mostly valid HTML, with 'skip to content' links, etc. so they (or their designers) do seem aware of the need for standards-based coding, let's just hope the job gets finished :)

Written by Adam on

Adam is a Director of User Experience by day and photographer as time allows.

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