I was thinking it holds up quite well, compared to my subjective memory of websites from that vintage. There are no scrolling banners or other dancing garbage (with the exception of one animated GIF that is relatively restrained), and the layout wouldn't look out of place today if the elements had a bit more room to breathe.
Even the markup is surprisingly clean:
* Most tag names are lowercase
* Attributes are double-quoted
* Some style attributes with CSS
I'm surprised to see FrontPage generated this code - I remember it being more gnarly than this. That said, I'm enjoying the historical artifacts:
* Table-based layout
* <font> tags
* <body> tag has background, vlink and alink attributes
The tightness of the layout probably stems from low resolution screens. In '96 the most typical display size was something around 640x480 or 800x600, not a lot of room to breathe there.
In the last month, I've had 2 people tell me (unsolicited of course) that my website looks like it was made 10 years ago.
I went to this 1996 campaign site and said with dismay, it looks like my website.
I recognized many of of the above historical attributes (table-based layout, centered narrow, body bgcolor attribute) in my own site.
I've got a full-time job as a UNIX system administrator, and a part-time business training sys admins. I don't have the website redesign merit badge or time to earn one. I'd pay for a redesign but I don't even know what to ask for except "a website that presents my company well". And I want people to stop staring at my website like there is something wrong with it.
Would appreciate any help you can offer, either by recommending a designer or a design, please.
If you don't mind looking a bit like other sites, I'd highly recommend using bootstrap as a basis for a modern-looking redesign. You can customize it to your will, or even buy some bootstrap-based layouts to work with for not much money: https://wrapbootstrap.com/
As someone who learned table-based layouts and who now designs using HTML5 and CSS3, rest assured that the "new" web is not that hard to learn as long as you understand the basics of css. And almost all your JavaScript skills will transfer. It's really as easy as picking up a book on HTML5 and reading it. Alternately, check out: http://diveintohtml5.info/
Unless your site is a differentiator for your business, I wouldn't go hog-wild on it. I'd start by looking at something like ThemeForest, where you can browse around, see if you find something you like, and buy it for not-a-lot-of-money.
I doubt anyone would have used CSS in 1996, and "FrontPage 6.0 [2003]" did not exist back then. FrontPage might have only been used as part of the archival process (for removing links to dynamically generated pages and other excluded content and adding a fourth footer line to every page).
The thing that stands out to me is that the text styles are basically browser default, in particular the Times New Roman (i.e. serif) font, and that distinctive dark blue for all links. Most sites use sans-serif fonts, which are more readable at lower resolutions. While most sites retain blue as the color for in-line links, links that are structural (e.g. the menus on left and right) tend to be given styles more akin to the rest of the site.
Also those graphics would be JPG on a modern site, not GIF. The lower bit depth on the colors is quite apparent.
It's not just the grainy images, right? Is it the smaller text? More compact style?