When I did my first webdev in 1997 I would use Geocities' file manager (think it looked like this, although it wasn't affiliated with yahoo at the time: http://ibcomp.fis.edu/graphics/tech/geocities.htm) and probably used WS_FTP as well for publishing content. Didn't use CSS, although it existed (center tags were nice) or much javascript (maybe just alerts).

BTW, this text on the site is false: "Geocities has one big advantage - it has been around a long time, and will probably continue, so it won't suddenly disappear and take your web-site with it"

Also used to use a bigfoot.com "Email forwarding for life" which I assume stopped working at some point.