Frames Are Bad For Business

Hey, everybody, I just discovered the greatest toy for kids. It is an absolutely amazing wooden marble roll set. It is a bit on the pricey side, but man is it beautifully made. To learn more about it and buy it, check out the product’s page.

Oh. Oops. I guess I can’t actually link to the product directly because the site uses frames. I can’t:

• put the item on a wishlist
• send my brother a link to it, in case he thinks his kids would like it

• bookmark it with a social networking site like delicious

In this particular situation, my wife heard about this website through a podcast in which a mother was talking about a really good breastfeeding pillow that she couldn’t find in stores. All she could say is that the label said “honeysucklebaby.com”. So that led her to type that URL directly into the browser and go to the site.

Inexplicably, the site restricts you to a single frame when you visit the site by directly typing in that URL. And thus, my wife found herself unable to bookmark the product she learned about from another person.

When typing in the url, what should have happened is that she should have been re-directed to the non-frames version of the site. This non-frames version is the one Google will direct you to if you search for a product, and is the version of the site that allows bookmarking, and sharing of product links. For example here is the Grow Nursing Pillow she heard about and wanted to bookmark, but couldn’t while in the frames enabled honeysucklebaby.com site.

Frames used to be much more overused than they are now. But shockingly the message is not out there to everybody: frames are a terrible design decision.

For an online retailer the use of frames is almost the worst business decision you could possibly make. They should be avoided at all cost.

Saturday June 28, 2008