Designing with Web Standards was the bible during the web's golden era. Peer's minds were being blown that we could lay stuff out without tables and spacers.

My personal website from those days landed me a job at one of the biggest web firms in my city at that time. Made my own design in Photoshop, laid out the page with tables and of course the trusty spacer.gif! Good times. Unfortunately the archive.org snapshots of my site aren't loading the images, even though they used to :(