You don't need fancy frames.
You don't need so many graphics that the pages take a year to come up.
All sorts of SSI and CGI is a pain in the tail.
So I generate html with Lynx/vi, the best editing suite in the world.
It's great. Of course, I'm running Linux. Yes, I could be using Communicator Gold and building foofywah pages like everyone else.
Sure, my pages look dull in comparison. But I'm confident that anyone can read them online, comfortably.
Obviously, the first step is to get them on your system. The easiest way to do this for most personal computers is to run Linux.
Once you've got that all figured out (it took me a solid week to recover from the Brain Damage at Microsoft), create a directory to hold your target website. You may also wish to have several virtual consoles going, one perhaps with a Lynx pointed at NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML. Personally, I downloaded (via lynx "d" command) a copy to my local disk so I don't have to wait for 70k to come up over the net each time. This also points to several other useful links, like w3.org's HTML specs, including the list of special characters. This will allow you to use such neat things as ° ¥ ¢ and the like in your html documents.
Then it's a simple matter of pointing your development lynx to your source. Have you tried "lynx index.html" in your local directory containing all sorts of useful web pages? It's neat, huh?
Type "o" for options in lynx. Set the editor to something you're comfortable with, like vi. Do a ">" to save the options, and perhaps an "r" to go back to your regularly scheduled development. Navigate your way to a local document you'd like to edit, and tell lynx "e". Wow, huh? Isn't that swell? There's the source for your document, in your editor.
Only one problem I've found with this setup... Lynx can't create pages nicely. That is, it can edit a file that is in the local directory; it just can't nicely create a new one. The file menu (dired) is supposed to help with this.
My cheap-hack workaround is to use two or three consoles at once. One to actually work in, one for reference, and one shell so that I can "touch" a new file.