Some browsers don't print content from frames correctly. Frames make it clumsy for people with 640 x 480 monitors to browse your site. Fixed-width frames often hog too much of the screen, leaving just a small area to read the text. Otherwise, stay away from frames entirely. But do use left-side menus.
Text labels with hypertext links .
While these look a bit less sophisticated, they make your site come up very fast and are much easier to maintain than graphic menus. I used to build sites using nice looking image maps on the left side, but no more. 4.0 and 5.0 caused vertical image maps to fail. Now I use hypertext links along the left menu. One style sheet keeps all of the webpages in my site looking consistent.