Hi! I am the web developer and designer for Laguna Beach Bikini. Normally I don’t create any of the content, but I am responsible for the operation and look of the site. Most readers will not be interested in this article because it is kind of geeky, so you can probably just skip it!
Mid 1990s
I first started creating websites in 1995. I was actually involved in online stuff before that because we had a dial-up Bulletin Board System and before that I worked with the original online service Compuserve way back then.
In the early days websites design was simple. Everything was done by hand. All the HTML code was typed into an ordinary text editor like BBEdit on the Macintosh or vi and emacs on unix. To get everything to lay out properly we would put everything into nested tables–tables within tables within tables. We used a lot of single-pixel GIFs to space everything out. All the fonts, colors and all the formatting were inline coded right on each page.
This worked for a while until we had hundreds or thousands of pages on a website. When something needed updateding it was a nightmare. Even a little change like the year in the footer at the bottom of each page had to be edited by hand. We also made use of SSI (Server Side Includes). But to change the design of a website meant updating hundreds of html files. Ugh!
Turn of the Century
Around 1999, we had scripts that created all the pages for a website automatically from data that was stored in flat text files. Flat files are a simple kind of database. Unfortunately flat files don’t scale well, meaning as the amount of data increases it takes longer and longer to rebuild the site.
I believe sometime around 2000 or so Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were introduced. The idea was to separate content from presentation. This allowed the content writers to write and designers to worry about the graphic design and layout, i.e. the “look”.
Then along came programs like Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive which provided a WYSIWYG editor for web page design. Although this sounded like a great idea, it still just created mostly static web pages. This was fine for a brochure-type site but not very helpful for interactive websites. These fancy programs were solving the wrong problem. The real future lay in dynamic web pages.
21st Century
Around 2002 I helped developed an e-commerce website using PHP4 and mySQL database software. This was a dynamic website that created all the pages on the fly from a relational database.
Around 2004 we experimented with using blog software like MovableType to create websites. Even though it was intended for blogging or daily journal entries we used it to create entire websites that required frequent updates. This was the first Content Management Systems that we used.
2008
By 2008 things have changed quite a bit from the good old days of hand-coding html. But the funny thing is we have come full circle. We are back to using a text editor to create the websites, although now instead of banging out html files, we write PHP files that spit out html. And its no longer html, now its xhtml and css files. With the introduction of themes, changing the look of a website now can be as quick as clicking a button. (After you’ve written all the PHP code, of course.) Our site runs on Wordpress which represents the current state-of-the-art in website design and implementation.
I believe these changes are for the better. Dynamic websites are more interesting than static websites and at the same time simpler to maintain. There is a division of labor so that writers, web designers, system administrators and programmers can specialize in what they do best.
Shameless Self-Promotion
I have some experience setting up websites for models. If there are any fashion or swimsuit models that need help setting up their website or blog I am available at reasonable rates. 
