Heavily text-based site, static layout. Compatible?

Hi,

I've been dabbling with creating a static layout web site using sliced images arranged in tables so as to frame my text. Now the problem with this is that you can either only insert a limited amount of text into these tables or use nasty iframes or the css equivalent (which seems just as bad to me) because the table won't expand with its content without the images being shunted out of line.

I know it's a better idea to use a simpler liquid layout for sites containing lots of text, but I've been there and done that and want to try something different. It's for a personal site so no-one is going to moan at me for doing things my way rather than the most practical way.

My question is, is there a better way to do this without using iframes or calling external pages, via php includes for example? Would it be possible to have everything contained in the same page and make the text scroll using buttons (without the need for scrollbars) while the rest of the layout remains static? Flash is probably the answer, but I wouldn't know where to start with that.

Hmm, I hope some of that made sense. We'll soon see.

Thanks very much for the advice/links. That's just what I was looking for. Considering search engines have such a hard time indexing content within frames though, I think I'll reserve their use for short snippets of text rather than whole articles.