I built my first web site in 1997 for a small clothing company on Long Island. When I started learning HTML (3.2, to be precise), hand-coding using BBEdit was the preferred method, and all designs were held together by Table tags. Today, I prefer to use visual editors like Adobe GoLive or Dreamweaver, but I find the experience of being able to "crack open the coding" invaluable.
Currently I design all of my sites using web standards: XHTML with Cascading Style Sheets. Why is this important? As newer browsers conform to web standards, sites designed using older and invalid methods will start to display incorrectly. Additionally, as portable devices grow more sophisticated, sites will be able to be redesigned for them just by designated a new style sheet.
The sites displayed here are a mix; some are pure XHTML, others are a hybrid of XHTML/Tables, and one is, shall we say, of "Vintage Technology". All, however, represent the look and feel I bring to my site designs - easy to use, clean, and elegant.