My name is Sandra Asher. I started "hand-coding" HTML in 1996. I created my own website to sell my crafts items, and as I built it - I decided I wanted to learn more about site design and SEO. I researched exhaustively, read lots of books and tutorial webpages and taught myself HTML.
I started with frames and moved to tables. I optimized for NetScape and IE (what a pain) and I tried diligently to adhere to the W3C guidelines. My page did fairly well and is highly ranked due to my previous diligence in meta tags, SEO and effective linking strategies. Being self-taught, and not one of Microsoft's greatest fans, I used to be a bit snobbish about my "hand-coding".
Then, I took over a website for a non-profit organization that had been done in FrontPage. It was a large website - and instead of completely redoing it by hand, I taught myself FrontPage. I begrudgingly must admit that it makes maintenance of a large informational website with changing information a lot easier (sigh). Alas, I find myself using FrontPage for most of my websites now - and have contemplated trying to learn CoffeeCup (which a friend of mine swears I would LOVE). I think that friends should let friends code by hand :).
I really prefer to code by hand, but it has been a while since I actually did so. I want to do a redesign of my crafts website and I want to do it "right". I guess you could say that this class is a way for me to see what I have been doing wrong and what I need to do to make it right.