I prefer using notepad a lot more nowadays. Dreamweaver made things too easy. I just mass produced everything and ended up with a wad of things I didn't even want. At least it was CSS friendly. I find it's more entertaining for me to take a plain CSS layout, one with room for navigation, content, and a header (I add in a footer later) and add images to it, text to it, and content to it until 1) it validates and 2) it looks decent. While I haven't done templates for a while, I find that's the best way to go about making something. It puts more of your work into it, and if you're charging by the hour, that's the best way to do it

yes, they want money,and if you dont have the skill to make your own site, they are going to use you for all the money you are worth. my advice, is to ask someone like me or my friends to make you one for you for like 99 cents or go to microsoft.com aand search free office live and join and get a free domain name and u cna make it easily on that.

Try the openoffice program. it is free and should be able to provide for everything you want for your web designing.

Hey..this is just a marketing technique..To avoid this , fall in love with open source/free softwares.
No matter what thing you need in your site, there is always an appropriate CMS platform.
Then design basic template with all web- designing softwares out there to get a perfect look you want.Even if you are not going to code yourself, a lot of free templates always there to help you. You can manualy edit them with little Html knowledge to give it a customised look.
So, starting from zero to build a website is not good idea;if you are not programmer.

Well...notepad is the no 1 choice.
Crimson editor is also pretty good.
Its kinda like an interpretor.
And for web templates,
Use Photoshop

Alot of free sources like notepad are pretty good. If you want to get a good template, you can use photoshop. You should have at least a somewhat knowledge of programming if you want a decent template/web design.

I agree. If you can't do anything for the design part and for the coding as well, you can try CMS. You'll always have to go into the code for some little things. Really, give a try to CMS like Joomla or Wordpress (for more bloggy look and features). And then you will find lots of themes and templates that will be easier to modify.

But, about the marketing thing, it's a common thing to me. I've never been in those kinds of requests since I do everything myself and for free ! No, truly, try to ask people around you to help you with your site. I try never to rely on "commercial" things. I've been helping a local american football club to develop their site, get it search engine friendly and such. But now, they have it running without my help and they are using Joomla. Maybe it's my own point of view but when I'm designing or developping a website for someone, I always try to make it "admin friendly" for those who will have the hard task to keep it going...

by the way, sorry for my long rambling, but I think that you should really try using a CMS for a start. Good luck to you.

if you want you can dl the crack version though its also illegal. have tried using ms word to make website before, it sucks but the good thing is its bundled with a windows computer, easy to use, you can edit it in notepad also bundled with windows

don't know if you can still do this though.

Get a free site from here, then learn to code from here: www.w3schools.com. Learn some Photoshop stuff, job done.