What do you guys think of think of these sites? How may they be improved?

In my opinion website are very subjective to one's personal opinion, kinda like art or music. But overall I think you've done a good job with structuring the website for easy navigation. A couple things I think would help, is to make sure your backgrounds are distracting or drawing too much attention. It can be as simple as adjusting the transparency to make it softer and make sure if it's tiled, pick a image than can be tiled without noticing when it starts to tile. It could be my computer but always optimize your images for fastest download. Some of them seemed slow for the small image they were.

The second opinion is to always give your text some breathing room or white space around it. Tight cropped text is difficult to read and makes a website seem amaturish, and doesn't have any flow.

Overall, good job. When I'm working on a design I always search online to other websites and find elements that I like and combine them to create a new look. I can find it much easier than starting with a completely empty slate and try to create something from nothing.

Looks like all the sites are hand crafted HTML? If yes, awesome. Straight HTML files mean speed because no server side processing is needed.

If you are interested in even more speed there is a world of optimizations possible. Some of the easiest gains would be minifying the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files so they are smaller, still work exactly like now, and download faster. Combining (aka concatenating) multiple JavaScript files into one file can help performance too.

Oh and losslessly optimizing images is a super easy performance boost too. No harm to images files, just smaller file sizes and faster downloads. If you have a Mac I would recommend checking out ImageOptim.

If performance optimization is something that sounds interesting to you can you can try an analyzer like GTmetrix to learn more or jump straight into a tool like Feri.

If you are interested in Feri let me know and I'd be more than happy to impart any knowledge I have. Full disclosure, I am the creator of Feri and totally biased in her favor as a solution. ;)