My first paying client when I was 19 (so around 1998?) commissioned a local high school graphic design student to hand paint this crazy village scene with stores. She then had it professionally scanned and gave me the files... which I then used to create an image map for each of her little "store fronts". She couldn't accept payments online (they didn't teach me that in my community college HTML course), still had to print out an order form and send in a check. I will never forget the horrid repeated plaid background she made me use.

I miss the early ugly web lol.

Image maps were top-notch to make menus with graphical buttons on the left, to change the iframe page on the right :)

Talking of slicing: https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/raggedfloat/demo.html

My favorite workflow was to make a totally l33t render with 3dsmax, put it in Photoshop to draw UI buttons, and then use Imageready to slice it and autogenerate the html slices and maps. Instant fancy website that made me a cool kid as far as I was concerned

If you were using 3DS for web design you were legit l33t :)

I pulled an all-nighter to hand in a college homework to demonstrate gradient descent using Maya once. Sadly, the teacher was not impressed. Good times.

Or faking an image map using tables: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/