Building websites today is a lot more challenging and time consuming than it used to be. Some of my first websites were first designed in Adobe Photoshop, ® exported to HTML tables (yes tables) and then linked together with Adobe Dreamweaver. ® If your website did not exceed the width of common monitor resolutions (1024px by 768px) everything would work out fine.
Web standards[1] were quickly introduced because using table markup for grid layout is just bad practice. So HTML tables were replaced with floated divs and tag markup that had meaning – referred to as semantics. This also shifted things away from the majority of the visual design being baked into images and now relying on CSS3 to create borders, shadows, rounded corners, etc...