Opinions on website building software

[Carbo]

I'm looking to build my first site, and I must admit to much ignorance in this area. It will be an online retail business, and it needs to be professional in look and layout.
First, can someone with no background in this sort of thing actually buy a program and turn out a quality site?
If so, can you recommend a good piece of software for the job? I see programs like Dreamweaver are upper end, to say the least. What about a program like Website Complete 5.0, from godaddy.com? I have to think there must be quite a difference between the programs considering the difference in price.
Opinions??

 

[Superwormy]

First off, it really depends on what you are doing on this online retail business site.

If you plan on having a shopping cart, letting people make purchases online, etc. thats a big project, and you can't use JUST HTML to do that, you need something like PHP or ASP or need to buy some prepacked crap software like Shopsite.

For strait HTML, you're definitally best off learning to code by hand. You can do this in frickin Notepad if you wanted. Macromedia Homesite is a very nice souped up Notepad that color codes stuff, kinda cool.

Never used WebComplete, but Dreamweaver is kind nice for first learning HTML. Hand coding still rules.

If you have some sense of good design and are willing to put in the time and work, anyone can turn out a quality site.