A Realtor Site Shown Inside a Frame

The site

A residential real estate agent in a commuter suburb, working under a franchise brokerage. Her business cards, sign riders and email signature carry a short domain made from her name.

Type it in and a polished page appears: her photograph, featured listings, a search box and a contact form. Click a listing, then another, then the contact page. The address bar still shows her domain and nothing else.

Behind it, her registrar's forwarding with masking is showing a page from the franchise's agent website system inside a frame. Her domain holds no pages of its own, only a frame around someone else's.

The browser tab shows the same title on every page, the one the frame was given when the forwarding was set up.

The inference a visitor makes

A buyer finds a townhouse on the site and wants to send it to her partner. She copies the address from the bar and pastes it into a text. Her partner opens the agent's home page.

She tries again, gets the same result, and sends the listing from a national listings website instead, where every listing has its own address.

The inference is not dramatic. The agent's own site is harder to use than the big portals, so the portals become the place to look, and the agent becomes one name among many on them.

On a phone it is worse. The page arrives shrunk to desktop width, and a visitor reasonably concludes that the agent has not kept up.

What the frame breaks

Registrars offer two kinds of forwarding. A plain redirect sends the visitor to the other address, which shows in the bar. Masking keeps your domain in the bar and shows the other site in a frame filling the window.

The frame page itself is almost empty, and that one trick breaks several things at once:

• Bookmarks and shared links, which all lead to the front page.
• Search, which finds an empty frame on her domain.
• Phones, which get the desktop layout shrunk to fit.
• Forms and saved searches, which can fail inside the frame.
• The future, since one setting elsewhere can blank the page.

The first is the one visitors meet within a minute, and the one this agent heard about from a client.

Nothing can be bookmarked or shared

Because the address never changes, there is no way to point at a particular listing, a particular search or the contact page. Bookmarks, copied links and shares all lead to the front page.

Sharing on Facebook fares no better. The share shows the frame page, with its generic title and no photograph, rather than the listing.

For an agent whose listings are passed around by text and email, that removes the main way the site could travel.

Search engines see an empty page

Google reads the agent's domain and finds a frame with nothing of its own. Whatever the framed pages contain is credited to the franchise system's address, if anywhere.

A search for the agent's name may therefore show the franchise page at its long address, or a directory listing, instead of the domain on her cards.

And many agents on the same system share near-identical template pages, which gives search engines little reason to prefer any of them.

Phones get the desktop layout

A page tells phones how to size itself with a setting in its code. The franchise page may have one, but the frame around it usually does not, so phones lay everything out at desktop width and shrink it.

Frames also scroll awkwardly on phones, with the page sometimes sliding inside a window within the window.

Forms and logins inside a frame

Some browsers, Safari among them, refuse by default to let a site shown inside another site's frame store cookies. Saved searches, favourites and logins inside the frame can fail without any message.

The frame also hides where a form really goes. A visitor typing a phone number and a home address into the contact form cannot see whose site receives it, or whether the connection is secure.

One setting away from a blank page

Framing other people's pages can be abused to trick visitors into clicking things, so many systems send an instruction telling browsers not to show them inside frames.

If the franchise system ever turns that on, every masked domain shows a blank page overnight, and the agent finds out from a client.

A worked example

The agent noticed when a buyer, an hour before a showing, texted that the link to the house kept opening the home page.

That week her registrar's forwarding was switched from masked to a plain permanent redirect. The address bar now shows the franchise page's real address, so every listing link works and can be shared.

Over the next two months she had a small site built on her own domain: a page about her and her area, neighbourhood pages, recent sales, and listings through the feed her board offers for members' own websites.

The site is responsive, so phones get a layout built for them, and every page has its own address. The franchise page links to it, and her cards and sign riders did not have to change.

The counter-case within the site

The franchise page itself is not the problem. It is maintained, often responsive and connected to the brokerage's listings, and an agent new to the business can sensibly start there.

A plain redirect from her domain to that page is honest and works: the address changes, links can be shared, and search engines know where the content lives.

The fault is the mask. Point the domain plainly at the franchise page for now, build a real site on it when you can, and never show someone else's pages inside a frame.

What to change

1. Type your domain and click through three pages.
2. Copy a listing's address and open it elsewhere.
3. Open the site on a phone.
4. Switch masked forwarding to a plain permanent redirect.
5. Ask your board about a listings feed for members.
6. Plan a site that lives on your own domain.
7. Keep the cards and signs pointing at that domain.

Step four takes minutes in the registrar's settings and fixes sharing the same day. Everything else can follow at the pace of the business.

Another case of a domain showing visitors something other than the site its owner expects is covered in the host's default page showing instead of yours.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.