[SteveDallas]

I'm with you, Skunks. I can't stand fancy crap on web pages that keeps me from what I'm looking for. My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a site and it invites you to "click here to enter the web site." (Bonus demerits if the introduction page (which is presumably NOT part of the web site) uses Flash.)

Oh and your background color should be white. That's FFFFFF. And no patterned backgrounds, it makes the text ("text? who cares about text?") too hard to read. I'm not saying it can't be done in an attractive manner, I'm just saying most of us don't posess the artistic skills to do it. So stick with plain white.

Wait, I just noticed the bit about the class. What are they defining as "pure HTML"? It's possible that the point of the exercise is to see if you can set up a functional, attractive web page viewable in a variety of browsers WITHOUT using floating blinking text or stuff like that.