I design my sites myself. Indeed i am beginning as a freelancer designer. Being counscious of what you is part of the beauty of working.

I've designed all my sites myself except for one for which I used Wordpress as the back end and I designed the template and a couple that incorporated an ASP shopping cart (which still required major customisation).

For the new version of my website, I use both. Wordpress is the CMS I use, although I did a bit of tweaking with one of the existing themes to make it look the way I want it to. It invloved a lot of CSS/PHP editing, so it took some time.

As for the old version, I did the design from scratch, using either Notepad or one of the Free HTML programs (like ACE HTML and 1st Page 2000).

I preffer to design my site by myself but when it comes about webportals with huge amount of information i preffer using CMS software.
Cheers!

Does wordpress {blogging script} count as a site builder? lol... because what's left of mine is only the posts...I deleted the whole layout and created my own.
Well I sort of now most html now and just type it all up by hand in notepad... it's all wrong but most of the time it works..and when there's a error it's easy to fix because the coding was all written by you and you sort of know your way around.

I've never used a site builder thing to create my sites but when I was little I tried to use the ANgelfire one and didn't understand it...

My site layout I made but some of the components there I just took from the cpanel and installed like the gallery. I've asked a lot of help from the guys here at the forums especially for PHP and MySQL coding since I'm only starting out. My friend asked me to make her a blog so I'll probaby use WordPress or PHP nuke for her site...couldn't decide yet.

I have never used a site-builder to make a complete site.. I started off learning raw HTML, then JS, then CSS, etc.. and worked my way up using only Notepad (I use Crimson Editor now though, great text editor!) and eventually I was proficient with the raw code. One day I tried using DreamWeaver and found it pointless because I had to learn a whole new program to make what I already knew how to make! lol Ever since then, I haven't been bothered to learn some specialized IDE just to make websites.. Plus, most companies (even if they are working with IDEs) want you to know and understand the code that the IDE spits out, so any neccessary changes can be made by hand..

If I were going to use a CMS I would have to build the CMS myself, I think that using a cms is a good idea if the website is not just for you, like forexample a business and the site were not really part of your job then updating it would be best if it was done quick, otherwise I think you should build the site yourself using whatever software you see fit (Dreamweave, notepad, HTML Designer, ect)

That's what I did, and now I'm planning a rewrite perhapse with a little Database, in the background for easy updating but otherwise I will build it myself.

This depends on the type of the site I'm trying to create and of type of customer (if I'm not doing it for myself). If I need content then I use Content Management System (aka CMS), and I prefer Mambo Open Source, since it is easy to use, customizable, and you can create templates easely. If I'm making more static, not-so-content-driven site I use Photoshop and Corel (for bitmap and vector graphics) in combination with Dreamweaver. I almost never code PHP (sometimes only a few lines of code) since almost everything I need was already made by someone else. Sometimes I use MySql for simple databases, tebles, and user management. I wish I knew some more Flash to incorporate it in my sites, since it looks nice, and I hope to learn that someday...