Hey Steven! It's past-you leaving a little note. Freelancing a website that isn't on a website builder will only ever boil down to using a template (the best free-to-use templates being HTML5UP), or coding from scratch.
Just keep in mind that if you code from scratch, you will be doing all the architecture yourself. For example, right now, I'm working on a website for a candidate for their city council. After initiating a project with the following code:
npx create-react-app firstnamelastnameforcitycouncil
I set up a CMS-of-sorts as not to hard-code all the content (like I did for the last project). This takes the form of an object called content in a data folder. It looks like the Concert Diary project that we did for the Scrimba course. From here, we can swap out the placeholder text for copy provided to you from your client via Google Docs. They aren't technically savvy, so this was the most mutually agreeable solution.
Now, we did find this preferable at the time to using an HTML5 template because, let's face it, they're no plug-n-play. Those things are complicated. They are chock full of complex script and CSS and SASS, which feel at once impenetrably dense and more trouble than they're worth to learn. Such complicated engines feel like they require their own docs. I even looked up for YouTube tutorials on HTML5UP, that's how bad it got.
So yes, stick to your waterguns and code in a way that makes sense to you. Right now I have the components, appropriately named in their folders, as well as clearly labeled sections in the CSS. I also have a pretty consistent naming-convention going on. It looks like:
{section name}-{html tag}
Experiment, experiment, experiment. My workflow right now feels surprisingly smooth, maybe even mellifluous, despite having to exhume that 100Devs process of laying out all the content, and then styling later. Best to build, then learn those best practices later. But for now, I feel like I'm doing pretty well for myself. Whenever you're reading this, I hope you are too!
tl;dr: this is going well, I think.