using frames with wordpress

I’m not new to wordpress, I’ve been using it for awhile for my personal site, and now I’ve started creating a different site…

What I’d like to do is use frames with wordpress… a nav bar (with all the sidebar.php stuff in it) on the left and the posts on the right… I know it would require hacking the nav bar code to point to the frame (or iframe if that would be easier), but my biggest problem is splitting the nav from the rest of the blog.

My reasons for this are that I’d like to have a photo gallery and a wordpress installation that work together seamlessly… I use an export plugin for iPhoto on my Mac, and it’d be real nice if I could just add a link to the gallery in the wordpress links area – so that when that link is clicked, it opens the gallery in the frame (or iframe), and the wordpress nav is still over on the left, so that getting back to the blog just requires clicking on “home” or whatever in the wordpress nav.

You might say – why not just create your own nav, and then used a toned down theme in the frame and not worry about splitting the nav… well, i’d like the links and etc to still be controlled from the wordpress admin panel…

Anybody have any insight?