Doing as many sites as I do, I find it useful to have a program that does quick layouts - tables, cells, etc. Doing that by hand takes hours. Once the layout is done, you can code it any way you like.
I know that "saying" you use a program like FrontPage is taboo, but many people do and won't tell you for fear of being ridiculed. I'm old enough not to worry about such things.
Here is another wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor that works well.
Of course having MySQL, PHP, Perl, etc is a must today for any kind of interactivity..
Best.