I'm not disagreeing with the main point but in fairness html was a new technology at the time and coding websites was something few people knew how to do.
Seems easy now but we've go tools, tutorials and people to learn from now.
Really? I recall my personal roadkill website I had back in 1996 as a 6th grader. Picked up an HTML manual at the library when they still had card catalogs. Nothing too hard about it at all and Dreamweaver and Photoshop made it a snap if you were ignorant of markup.
It was a bubble. Too bad I was learning about Earth Science while people were making frivolous dollars.
DreamWeaver 1.0 wasn't released until December of '97 [1] and in November '96 Photoshop just released 4.0 [2], the first version with Layers, it still only had 1 undo, and text was rasterized (you couldn't edit it). FrontPage wasn't even released until around '96.
Most of the websites I remember from that period had a lot of cut and paste graphics (Photoshop was expensive, has a learning curve, and harder to use than today) so I'm sure custom graphics were expensive and people charged a high rate (with lower productivity). I can't remember any popular WYSIWYG authoring software prior to DreamWeaver/FrontPage. I would guess most were hand-written--which, as you know isn't hard, but the tools were a lot less refined and harder to find out about back then.
No, no it wasn't. HomeSite existed as a separate product well into the 2000s, although stagnant as all get-out as the competition trounced it: http://www.adobe.com/products/homesite/
I still remember owning Dreamweaver 1.0 and HomeSite simultaneously back in late '97.
I actually made money in the mid 90s making websites for people and I was born in 1989. I made websites for local teachers and the middle school. I had lots of walking around money as a kid in high school because I had a recurring payment from work that had begun in 2001 at the height of the dotcom era.
Seems easy now but we've go tools, tutorials and people to learn from now.