[General] What's best frames, or a reload.

[-fedexer-]

Hey guys,

Probably not the best title in the world but here's the question, on a general basis, which do you think is better. A navigation where you click the link and the content is (the content only being text and images loaded from a db, the rest of the layout is taken care of) shown in a frame, meaning the page does not require to reload, or the standard way of having the whole page reload with the new content. So basicly frames = one page, and everything feeding through the frame, or the standard way, or which i believe is evidently going to be better for search engines. I would also asume using a frame, that the bandwidth usage would be lower , as all of the page doesn't need to be reloaded?

So, in your opinion or knowledge, which method is best when designing a site. (I'm sort of working on a personalised CMS for a group at my school, as they need a website, and require to be able to edit it, but don't know any languages/how to use ftp clients etc so a CMS is the best way i can think of for them, and i don't fancy using a already existant CMS such as joomla, as this may at some point in the future be used in a portfolio.)

 

[Daevius]

Avoid frames where ever you can! It's evil.

If you really want to change only a part of the content, use AJAX, which is simply a Javascript API which calls PHP pages. So you can update a site using PHP while your page is already loaded. You can simulate frames with it, and it's in the end a much better solution (and less stuffing around with links that open a page in another frame etc.).

You can also go the easy way, and resend the page if something needs a change. It will barely cost much bandwidth, especially if you use external CSS files (which get cached client-side). Then using the ModDeflate (Apache module) you can compress outgoing HTML pages to save on bandwidth. Also, all images that should be lossless and in the smallest format, choose PNG and use PNGOUT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNGOUT). If it's a blurry background, use JPG's, they are not lossless, but are smaller.

 

[-fedexer-]

Thanks Daevius, thats along the lines i was thinking, i reckon i'll just stick to the good old resend method, instead of messing with AJAX and frames, for now.

 

[Illusion]

Maybe try using the include() function.

I think it is the easiest and that's what you should be using if your using an CSS layout.

 

[-fedexer-]

Ohh trust me i do :winky: , was just trying to work out the truly best way of having the navigation load the page. But i know what i shall do now.