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.