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I don't have much experience with frames, but my instinct would be that you should consider some other method of designing your site. Frames have many problems that aren't easily worked around. Unless you have a very good reason, you might want to just redesign without the frames.
Of course, I say all this without having the slightest idea what your site is or what your needs are . . .
I am a 800 x 600 user, and design for that because there are a lot of surfers at that resolution. It always surprises me when I switch 1024x768 to test, the number of major sites that don't work well at that resolution, for example the big "G".
I would guess that the cause of the difficulty for your display being dynamic is the frames. They really create a rigid look, that doesn't spread out well. I would rethink using the frames and move to a more dynamic layout using php and css. There is a lot of good stuff here about migrating over to css in the CSS forum. Post any questions about it there.
As a surfer I really dislike to scroll a page. If I don't see what I want above the fold, I tend to move on. If I am scrolling a page, I'm either using the scroll mouse or the page down button. A framed site doesn't handle either of those methods well. Having to scroll a section of a page, doesn't make me want to stay on that site, and it's really all about retaining visitors.
As a designer I am always looking for ways to shorten up my pages. I find I have better visitor retention, by having them navigate to a new page, rather than trying to find what they want by staying on he same page.
I really not frames bashing, I'm just passing on some observations about frames. I do have a special rant about trying to print a framed page. ;)
Good luck,
jb
If you remember nothing else about screen size, remember this: SCREEN SIZE DOES NOT EQUAL BROWSER SIZE and FRAMES ARE BAD.
It is true that most people at 800x600 maximize everything. (This is related to physical screen size (in inches) and simply a limit on how many pixels are needed to make letters and pictures recognizable.) However, once you get to higher resolutions, it's increasingly common for people to show more than one window at a time, and that means they aren't maximized. For example, I have a 21" monitor and a 1600x1200 resolution, my browser window is usually about 1000x450, but that changes depending on what I need to see at the time. I have found that other users of resolutions similar to this (representing the large end of the current spectrum) do similar things.
Conventional Web pages are one long strip. If you want to limit horizontal width, use CSS's max-width. (MSIE needs a DHTML fix to make that work, IIRC. Get with it Microsoft!) Otherwise design your elements to flow, keeping in mind what is generally seen before scrolling.
Frames are bad because of assumptions on screen size. They can be used effectively, but when designing for the Web-at-large, that means very minimal use. (See for example, Google's Image search and the Horde webmail client.) If you are designing for yourself only or a specific network like a corporate intranet, then you can get away with such assumptions much more easily.
The best solution is to design your site for a variable size. In other words, you don't design for any resolution.
This isn't newsprint with everything set in concrete. The web is dynamic and flexible and is much more advanced than the old way of doing things.
