TGSHAW on 10/16/2006
The entire page scrolls together at VisionExpert, but I see they do use a frame to keep their navigation stationary at the top. (The "frame" in the title indicates which language you've picked out of the drop-down box.)
Most of the others use the "inner scrolling table" thingy - I suppose it has a name - that's so popular right now. The place that sells chocolate has the scroll bar on the far right, like the ezgenerator site does, but most seem to have the scroll bar on the right side of the table that's scrolling. This seems to be the primary way these sites, at least, handle different screen resolutions. VisionExpert must do it a different way.
The only one I see using what I'd normally think of as "frames" is Sample Fusion. They have an inner scrolling table thingy, too, but it doesn't all scroll together. The left navigation sidebar stays stationary while the page scrolls.
As I understand it, the ways the other sites are using frames wouldn't have much effect on the search engines, because they don't have any content in the parts of the screen that don't scroll. But there are some other things going on that I believe are worse for search engines than frames are.
For example, most of the sites open new pages within the home page instead of navigating to a different page; if you click on different buttons you'll see that the URL stays exactly the same even though the page content changes. As I understand it, this makes it difficult to optimize a page for search engines, because all the pages use the same URL. But I suppose it would depend on what kind of a site you had.
I had to go back and re-look to remember the other thing I noticed, and I see it's only one site: djnitro has an "enter" page which is usually not a good thing. But it does seem to be common in that niche, so I suppose that's why they have it.
The one that really has a pro thing going is the chocolatier. They don't use the one-URL-fits-all system. They have their scrollbar on the right of the screen instead of the right of the table so the entire page scrolls together, and if you look at the source code they don't use frames. They use a table, but it evidently scrolls with the rest of the page. And to top it off, they seem to be using style sheets, and have a proper W3C set-up for their header information. It'd be interesting to know what they like about ezgenerator that keeps them using it when they probably have the ability to do sites without it.
