Chris - I took a quick look at your HTML code (before you posted that, actually) and it's obviously not been created by a machine and designed to be maintainable by hand. In fact I don't see why it shouldn't work, except I'm not a javascript expert. But your approach (hand coded HTML) is what I do.

As for Microsoft, it's not that their browser is W3C copmpatible and others aren't. The real complaint against them is that they add lots of "extensions" to the standard, which they quietly exploit in their web page creation tools, so that pages created by the latter look fine in Explorer but not on other browsers. Netscape used to do the same. In some cases thoses extensions are useful or so widespread that they can't be ignored and in some form later become part of the W3C standard.

As for your point about "static" pages, my previous remark about the web being all about content applies again. What keeps visitors coming back is interesting and frequently updated content. Any amount of flashy effects and javascript will not help if your pages go out of date.

Anyway, keep it up, you are doing a good job and taking (IMO) the right approach. I hope you'll be able to replace that "best viewed with MSIE" banner away and replace it with a "Best viewed with Any Browser" campaign sticker soon. Yes, such an organisation exists:
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ and the info there might help.

Also try www.echoecho.com for lots of useful tools for HTML help and evaluating your website in various ways.

Anahata