Personally, when I was dabbling with HTML, I found it useful to use a WYSIWYG editor (at the time, FP Express, ugh) to get the layout etc. right - writing tables and such can be a daunting task. However, once the design was right, I ran through it manually to fix up all the bloat, and later, found a small freeware program meant to simplify pages written in FrontPage. Worked like a charm, and looked good.