CSS is a must! One might might not wanna spend time having to learn it, but you'll never write a homepage without it again once you've used it once
Not only does it give you more choices to design the webpage, but if you're using a seperate css file and changes made to that file is made to all html files linking to the css

Btw, anyone tried Ruby on Rails? I haven't done any web programming in a while (did a little php some time back), but a friend of mine has had a look at it, and he seems pretty psyched about it

But Mike, as PS said,
Frames = nogo
Times New Roman = nogo (I'd stick to Verdana)
Tables = I'd probably go with divs. Haven't used them much, but I've had loads of compability problems with tables...

Other than that, looking good Mike

Oh, and as for learning, I'd stick to Notepad any day! Nothing makes codes and syntax stick in your memory than having to write it all without some program guessing what you're typing