It is always good to know html. This way when you playing around with Dreamweaver and you want to make some changes to the code, you can do so. Also is you want to make a career out of it, I would strongly recommend learning Xhtml and CSS. No one will want to hire you if you only know how to build a website using Dreamweaver. Although never underestimate it's power. Dreamweaver is definitely one of the most powerful web design tools out there and some people and companies prefer to learn to use Dreamweaver than invest in a web designer. Hope that helps!

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It also kind of helps to use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver just to learn HTML. You make some stuff in design view, then look at the cod that was generated, and you can learn a lot. Sometimes it can help more than the w3schools tutorials.

Once you get the basics from that, it becomes really easy to code in HTML. If you want to do something new, you can always just google it, or try and figure something out with CSS or javascript.

PHP is more for the functionality of the website. If you need to use a database or something, that is the most useful, unless you know some other server-side language.

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You should probably have a good idea about both if you want to be decent at web design. But if you wanted to choose one to learn more about, i'd make it coding. You can only go so far when making a webpage graphically when you need to dip into your coding skills and mix around with the php and css to make your site look exactly how you want it to. It might seem a little bit harder at first but, trust me, it will pay off. It's also good because you loose the bottleneck that is coding because with coding, you can only do so much as your knowledge allows you however with design, you can do as much as your creativity lets you do. the choice is easy

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I agree with the previous post. I'm myself more on the design side because it's more easy for me (already using Photoshop and such for other type of art). Anyway, I try to go into the coding side because it's the most important thing. You can customize your own site and understand what you are doing. Indeed, I use CMS like joomla or even wordpress when I'm lazy and don't want to go that much into coding but sometimes you haven't the choice. But it's easing your pain too using CMS. Anyway, I don't think it'll give you the best overall-looking site... That's my point of view anyway.
I'm also using Flash to create some sites but it also needs coding skills even if it's not the same language. Some will look down on me about using Flash since it's quite a polemical issue about doing websites in a whole flash way.

So, finally, you have to go on each side, both coding and design, but coding will be the most painful part (the one I'm currently experiencing right now...). But it'll be really useful for you to do so.

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Thats right you can design your site to be as flash as you want but when you come to finally build it its in HTML so you will be limited to what you can do here by how much HTML and CSS you know. This doesn't take awfully too long to pick up but it does take considerably much more time to really master. If you really enjoy building websites and want to make a career out of it you have to master your web coding skills. A CMS is the easy route out and you are limited by what you can do with a CMS. I see jobs out there on a rare occasion where they want you to have CMS experience but I don't really get it since its like saying you need experience in dreamweaver where you could do HTML in any text editor.

If you don't care about being an expert in HTML/Web then go use a CMS it will be less headache for you to get a site up and you have access to somewhat useful controls that have been built into them.

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First, you had your caps lock on.

Secondly, you gotta choose for yourself. It's best to do both. But if you want to stick to one, stick to which one you prefer. Remember though, if you got for the designer you still gotta learn abit about coding to develop an actual working site. And you can create a whole site simply by coding.

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