The first website I designed was for an art gallery in Nashville more than 6 years ago, and it's certainly not the type of work I'd put in my portfolio. I learned site building with HTML books and Notepad. I've moved on to tools that help me work faster, but I still enjoy working in the code and making sure it is valid, lean, and, as much as site code can be, elegant.
Here are some examples of sites I've developed: