Net Q & A

There are two reasons this might happen. Some low budget sites use "redirection" to save money. They want to have a customized address, or URL, but keep expenses to a minimum. One way to do this is through redirection. Set up a site with an inexpensive or free web host, or as a subsection of an existing site. Some businesses will "redirect" requests for a URL to one of these inexpensive sites at nominal expense. NameSecure.com is one business that provides this service. This is a reasonable compromise for hobbyists and others who are working on a tight budget.  Porters Online, a family reunion site, is a good example.

The more common reason for this phenomenon is the designer's use of a feature called "frames." Frames are commonly used to present navigation information. There are a number of drawbacks to the practice, however. Some of them are explained in the following section from an article I wrote for the  March issue of Trial magazine (ATLA's flagship publication):

Frames are a way of dividing a Web page into sections, some of which can remain fixed while information in other frames moves. Frames were all the rage a few years ago, but there seems to be a consensus among today's best designers that their drawbacks outweigh any advantages. Among other problems, frames make it more difficult for others to give "pinpoint citations" to sections of your Web site, thus making your site less attractive to others who might want to build links (and the resulting referrals of potential clients) to you. Further, frames are more difficult for search engines to process, so frames-based sites tend to show up lower than they would if their content were in a more search-engine-friendly format. Few, if any, of the alleged advantages of frames cannot be easily duplicated by a skilled designer using tables and "server side includes" (both of which are easy if using modern design software like Microsoft FrontPage).

The article, which won an APEX Writing That Works Award for best "Feature How-To Article," is reprinted at the ABA's eLawyering web site.

To get the URL or IP address of a particular page, you can try right clicking anywhere in the page, and then selecting the option "Open frame in new Window," or something similar. You will get just that section of the page, without navigation information.