J.

In my "day job" I'm a web developer, and having tried both Dreamweaver and GoLive (and all the other programs mentioned here, too) I've settled on GoLive as the backbone software for my job. The main reason is because how seamlessly it works with Photoshop, ImageReady, and Quicktime.

The argument that you should write your own code is only valid from an "understanding what's happening" point really...but that's all. I started out before WYSIWYG editors existed, so I learned coding from scratch with a text editor. That's good in the fact that I DO understand all that's going on when GoLive does a lot of the coding for me now. But it just saves so much time to use a WYSIWYG editor, I don't really see a problem with letting it do most of the coding nowadays... sure, the coding is a bit ugly (that's another reason why I chose GoLive over Dreamweaver...better coding in my opinion) but the thing is, it works! And it looks and works just the way it was designed to.

Give both a try, but when you do, be sure to layout your page in Photoshop, then use the "layout" feature to import that design into GoLive, slice it up, and it's ready to roll. Really fast.

The days of counting kilobytes to determine load time are long gone in Asia... no one has slow connections hardly anymore. And things are changing fast in the US, too. I remember always sweating to stick to the "Keep the total bytes under 100K" rule. These days, we're making pages that, with graphic content and Flash integration can add up to 1 Mb per page. But when done right, it loads fast and starts immediately, while everything else loads in the background. So, I wouldn't worry too much that a WYSIWYG editor makes the code 10 to 20% heavier than hand-coding when that extra percentage only adds up to 10s of kilobytes.

Good luck!

J.

You might want to check out Freeway. This is a graphical page design environment. It's less than $200 and may be just what you are looking for.