Designing a photo website

Hi,

First, I am a newbie! Please be kind.  I've taken it upon myself to design a personal photo website in Dreamweaver 8. I've read the missing manual and must say it's easier to go through a tutorial than to sit in front of the computer and design your very own site.

The layout is very simple (a navbar on the left, a banner area with my name in it, a footer area with a copywrite notice, and a main content area containingg the pictures/slide show).  I purchased XML flash slideshow do present the content.  My simple requirements are that the navbar always remains on the right of the screen, the banner and the footer always remain on the top and bottom of the screen respectively.  The main content area must remain centered on the screen regardless of the screen size. Finally, I want a background picture that is continuous across the screen regardless of what elements are placed on it.

The question regards the most appropriate method to layout the site.  So far, I've tried both tables and frames.  I've had great difficulty doing this with tables (my shortcomings no doubt), but did manage to get this to work with frames with one glitch (see below).  I used the letterbox frameset to achieve the centering of the main content area.  Problem with the frames approach is that I can't figure out how to have one background for the entire webpage.  If there was a way to make the individual frames transparent to the main framset page then I could have a background image on the framset page that would show through each of the frames.  I may, of course, be going about this the wrong way.  Any comments or suggestions would be greately appreciated.

Louie