I do the home page layout in Photoshop or like program since the header and footer of the home page are going to be used on just about every other page. I am a big fan of write it once, create it once and use it many times. In the case of images they are loaded in the the person viewing your site browser cache and can come from their computer instead of your server which makes the page load faster. (logo's for an example) Photoshop has built in tools to compress the images for the web with preview of what it will actually look like compressed to the level you select vs the original.

For the actual html code I use a text editor called Textwrangler (freeware) by bare bones software.They do make a pay for text editor that supports html and java tags from libraries you import yourself.

Back five-ten years ago the software some used to create webpages others have mentioned threw off to many tags in the creation of the page that weren't needed and the pages became bloated and loaded slowly. People generally have faster connections now if these programs still throw off a ton of garbage tags not needed and the issue is not as pressing. If you don't want to learn html then use Dreamweaver or a like program others have mentioned.

Up until the newest company website currently under development we used to try to code for IE4, but not any more. Run you page(s) thru a website that can verify the code for compatibility for various browsers. Get as many browsers as you can and test yourself also. Not all browsers follow the html standards in how they interrupt the html tags

Since our website has a shopping basket system, we use a middleware program that was originally called Webcatalog, originally owned and created by Pacific Coast Software. Was owned by Smith Micro for a while. Now it is owned privately again and is called webdna. (www.webdna.us). Extremely powerfully software that is not that hard to learn and I use it all the time for semi static pages I have created for charities and the like that I also hosted on our server as you need to have a server deamon running that supports the webdna tags.

If you are going to run a middleware program to add features that straight html can't support and you are not hosting your own server then check with the hosting company as to which middleware they support if you wanted to explore that as an option and the power that middleware can add to a website

The google java tools have become almost the defacto standard and there is a lot of free stuff out there. Rendo's website uses a lot of them currently.

You see a website you like or see a website with a function you like then do a view source in you browser and 9 times out of 10, you can determine how they did it and or figure it out on you own espcially if it uses the google tool sets.

Gary

"Those who lose themselves in a passion lose less than those who lose their passion"