Luckily, I know what you mean (I think
).
You want to get rid of frames but you don't want to have to copy the top of the page and navigation links into every page? Keep your content separate from your layout?
What I do is have a template with navigation, title, logo at the top. Then I make lots of text files containing only the html that changes across pages, usually just the main content in the middle of the page. Then use php or other server-side scripting to include the content into the template. You can probably download a script to do this.
The main advantage over frames is that search engine spiders can navigate your site easier, apparantly. Coz when they get a hold of it your script has joined it all together and they just get the one page, same as the web browsers get.