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About the SiteBrowser CompatibilityI tried really hard to make the pages look the same with both Internet Explorer 4.01 and Netscape 4.0. For the most part, everything looks the same but things do look better with IE. These pages look nice with Lynx too. Netscape is very web-developer unfriendly! My biggest gripe is with the buggy style sheet implementation (specifically the DD and DT tags) and the overly restrictive JavaScript implementation. All my pages are designed to viewable on a wide range of displays. Everything resizes dynamically and things should look okay with browser windows that are at least 300x300 in size. Also, a display capable of hicolor or truecolor is highly recommended.
DesignA little while ago, I picked up The Non Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (no, not the actor). It's a great little book and I really recommend it. It only took me 2 hours to read through, but it was packed with lots of useful information on design.
FramesI used frames in my old web pages, but I've scrapped them because they're generally not a good idea. The way most sites with frames work, it is next to impossible to bookmark stuff, and they are a real pain with text-only browsers. I have yet to find a situation where frames are absolutely necessary. I find that everything that I use to use frames to do; I can pretty much achieve the same effect with tables and redundant links.
TablesI think tables are the most important tools in HTML design. With tables, you can make pages look the same regardless of the browser window size. I use tables in every one of my pages to position text and graphics. The borders on this page, for example, are just table rows and columns with a green background color. This allows the borders to fill the entire window regardless of the window dimensions.
GraphicsI drew most of the graphics on this site with Paint Shop Pro 5.0. You probably noticed that all the logos are characters from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts, hehe. I just colored them and put some other basic shapes around them. The pictures in CG Station are screen shots from the output of my a program I wrote for my Computer Graphics course. Paint Shop Pro isn't that powerful, but it's quite useful for doing web graphics.
HTMLI use to hate using WYSIWYG HTML editors, but now I use FrontPage 98 to do my web sites. Out of all the programs I've tried (Netscape Composer, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Pagemill, etc.) it has the most intuitive interface and it produces the most predictable results. I'm guessing a lot of you die-hard notepad/vi junkies are thinking "what a wuss!". Well, there are a bunch of reasons I use Frontpage. It is a lot easier to work with things like tables in a visual environment, you don't have type redundant tags all the time, and you can focus on content instead of other things. Most importantly, writing HTML manually is okay when I only have to do a couple pages, but maintaining a site is just too much work. It all depends on what you're doing; you choose the best tool for the job. This is not to say that FrontPage is perfect. There are TONS of problems with it, and it's not very configurable. It'll insert a lot of redundant tags, and clobber some things I put in manually. Sometimes it just makes a big mess of everything, pointing image and link sources all over the place, but you switch to HTML view and fix it manually.
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