Hi,

Based on review of our home-based photo business site and other reading on this and other forums the opinion seems fairly universal that use of frames is a bad idea, BUT ...

Seems to work...
- with 1024x768 or larger resolution there's no scrollbar on the sample galleries
- buttons, logo and menus stay where I want them (at the top on all pages)
- everything works in IE6/IE7/Mozilla/Safari
- general search-engine results are not very important to me at this stage

Cheap to assemble...
- integrates reasonably w/commission-based (free hosting) sales channel
- tools (Expression-web and JavaScript) are cheap and/or free

Seems to me that the local and casual customer who is hunting for services like ours isn't that likely to say "eww, frames!!" and click away, so I still don't really get why frames are so bad.

One alternative I found in the design forums showed drop-down menus that stayed in place... does something like this make better sense? or if not what alternatives would take the smallest least $$ / time / learning-curve?

At some stage we'll probably spend the $$ and up-scale to a Flash-site but not just yet... and if we can't afford $$ for Flash we can't afford a site designer either...

Thanks in advance for any advice or constructive opinions.

Frames are deprecated.

XHTML does not support them.

Future browsers will not support them.

Right, frames are so 1990!

But seriously, try using tables, or a pure CSS layout.
Both Are viable options.

Also an all flash site is not recommended, hard for people on older systems to browse, as well as making SEO on your site much more difficult!

Good luck!

sorry to plug myself here but i am a web designer and i charge quite inexpesively. that said web design does not have to be an expensive outing. i understand alot of companies will rip you off. go freelance and you can find yourself paying a small % of what you would regularly find. and an entirely flash based website is something to be considered greatly before delving into it.