This was my home page (http://cfaj.freeshell.org/) from about 1999 to 2003. The design is not bad, but the coding is abysmal. It does use a stylesheet (and a lot of in-line styling), but there is also a lot of invalid HTML and overuse of tables.
Despite the bad HTML, most browsers will show the page without any problem. There is so much bad mark-up on the Web, that probably more than 90% would be unreadable if browsers insisted on well-formed HTML.