Rationale

The final face of my site after the CSS has been applied is almost identical to my design flat. The differences lie within some of the proportions of the body and positioning of some elements in the header. I feel that the final layout is much better then the flat as it fits and displays everything to suit the information more realistically.
For example, there is a lot more information contained within the home page now, then there was when it was a design flat. Also, the navigation pane took up the whole right hand side of the site, but after coding that proved to be impractical and unnecessary. So it is now much shorter and straight forward.
One error I came across was trying to get the main-content's background image to just stretch (without messing up the proportions) to match the entire length of the site. However, after much trial an error I found that the repetition in the background worked well for the site and decided to stick with it.
Another difficulty was the learning curve that is W3C testing. After spending too long fixing up my HTML I learned a lot more about the structure of HTML code and how it works in relation to other sections of code.

All in all I am pretty happy with my site. It is exactly what I set it out to be, a simple HTML site that is pleasant to look at and easy to navigate through. I think if I had more time (and less other assignments) then it might have turned out a little more professional looking, with more refined features. Though having said that, it is still what I aimed for.
I feel that I have learned a lot about HTML and CSS coding, enough at least to move onto coding my personal site confidently.