There are actually only three reason to avoid frames all of which can be rectified or better understood. The first being SEO, the second being indexing of pages and the third being bookmarks. It is true, bots cannot crawl a site which uses a frameset as it's index page. The solution is simple, submit a sitemap or add links to other pages in the body of the index file. To avoid pages being loaded out of context i.e. outside of a frameset there are javascript solutions available. Pages being loaded out of context isn't important because index pages are always ranked far higher than inlinks therefore this scenario is unlikely. Bookmarks, personally I don't like creating folders for a site. There are some sites which I have created folders for however not many. If a site has a simple and intuitive navigation system there ought to be no need to add additional bookmarks, in fact a sign of site which has a good navigation system is a single bookmark.
Why use frames and what are the benefits? Well I have talked to designers who have created similar functions using CSS however they rejected the approach because of browser compatibility issues. Frames are common to all modern browsers. There may be occasions where sections of a page appear on several pages, using frames for duplicate content makes updating duplicate content easier and requires less space. It's not a matter of benefits, it's a matter of convenience and reliability, logic and common sense. However people still shy away from frames, I hope this article makes people realize that this reaction is primitive. It has become a habit, an unfounded stereotype and an accepted rule of thumb without authority, gathering momentum of it's own accord. Frames deserve credit and they were created for good reason, do not subscribe to hearsay.
Hear are a couple of perfectly legitimate sites which use frames, if you know of any others please comment the URL.
