Originally there were no design tools. You literally had a giant textarea and a save button. It wasn't even a rich editor. If you wanted any formatting, you had to learn the HTML. (in a time when there was nothing like Stack Overflow and no blogs or Youtube to learn from; Google wasn't even available early on, and the search engines were of varying quality)

If you were advanced, you'd use one of the external editors from the time (Homesite, Hot Metal, Hotdog, or even Microsoft Front Page) and FTP your files in.