Since graduating from college with a degree in Information Systems, I've been working full time for a family business. One of my tasks involved re-doing the company website (www.varland.com), while most of my work has been web application design on our intranet.

The company website was my first public website, and I'm now working on many more, because I've started doing freelance development work on the side. I have a few questions that I'd like to get some feedback on:

How important is it to design for the absence of CSS?

I know that in a perfect world all of my sites would degrade reasonably well in browsers without CSS integration or with CSS turned off, but it seems like a ton of work. If a company is paying me well, obviously I'm more inclined to work harder on graceful degradation. However, many of the sites I'm working on now are freebies, since I need to build a portfolio of public sites before I can try to make any money. I don't know what the stats are, but it seems to me that a huge majority of browsers support CSS, and none of the websites I'm working on target audiences who would use text-only browsers. As far as I know there aren't security risks involved with CSS files, so I don't think many people disable them, either. Basically, where do you draw the line, and how do some of you other designers decide how hard to work on non-CSS designs?

Note: I'm not talking about not designing good cross-browser CSS. I know that's a requirement, even though it sucks sometimes. I also try to structure my documents such that the most important elements come first in the XHTML code (using CSS to arrange the content as I see fit). That way, if CSS is not available, at least the page is presented in a logical order.

For javascript, do you prefer to do it yourself or use 3^rd party libraries?

There's a big part of me that likes to write all of my own javascript. Sure, I get ideas from 3^rd parties, but many times I prefer to look at their code, see what's going on, and redo a lot of it myself. I feel like I can eliminate overhead, have a better understanding of what's going on, and provide (in some cases) better error handling. There's a part of me that's quite a perfectionist, and I hate it when I go to one of my pages and see that there are javascript errors. I know that in the long run using 3^rd party libraries is probably more efficient, but I'm not quite ready to do it all the time. What do you think?

Sticking with javascript, is it okay to make javascript a requirement for a site?

This goes back to graceful degradation... There are a lot of times when I get frustrated trying to plan for the absence of javascript (which, I think, is more important that planning for the lack of CSS), and my first thought is to include a noscript block with a message about the site requiring javascript. I know that the trend is to design the site to work without it, but I wonder why there isn't a greater movement toward "minimum browser requirements" for websites. Obviously it would be possible to create requirements that would drive people away, but a few basic requirements (javascript on, CSS on, images on, etc.) doesn't seem unreasonable. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts. I'm trying very hard to improve my skills as a web developer and designer. I feel I've come a long way in a fairly short amount of time, but I know I still have a very long way to go...