I wish I got to reply sooner. Regardless if it is a troll, that is a commonly expressed view. Too many people pirated a copy of Dreamweaver and called themselves web designers. I try to distance myself from that whole trend.
I've always coded by hand. I tried Dreamweaver when it first came out, went back to using the product Macromedia eventually bought from Allaire, the name has escaped me on Windows. When I'm on *Nix I use Nedit or even Pico in a hurry. CSS has been around since 1998-9 at least. Once people moved passed Netscape 4 and it's buggy implementation it is a superior way to go than Dreamweaver, GoLive at least several versions ago, produces the ugliest HTML source I've ever seen.
I worked on no less than two custom content management solutions. The second of which has an elaborate customization template system, heck it was recently opensourced if you want to see http://www.gvcsitemaker.com/ I'm even going to write some sort of tutorial on translating templates between the two. You heard it hear first. WordPress has more templates but I made a few dozen for SiteMaker. SiteMaker had legacy issues especially on the menu and it was mandated by our main client that it had to support Netscape 4 on the Mac no less.
I managed to convert pretty much the entire company to the wonders of CSS and I got to put in CSS classes and ids into GVC.Sitemaker to make it more customizeable. Because WordPress made the correct decision and went with unordered list of links for navigation, they can do things like a horizontal menu which are impossible with tables, at least once the table structure is determined and "can not be changed". That still seems to be on the ta-do list for GVC.SiteMaker.
Anyway I've gotten off track. On the Mac get BBEdit or if your cheap TextWrangler, or if you're a Zeldman desciple get PageSpinner. For CSS there are some good general beginner tutorials online. I've even written one or two myself but I think they are all internal to various companies I've worked for. There is a style/template tutorial in the GVC.SiteMaker manual which is almost unchanged since I left. Most things with the UI seem to be done my way write down to the naming of a file as snazzy.css Good Old Uncle Ross always used that word so now it lives on...
Once you get the basics, classes, ids, box model, inherritance, I highly recommend Eric Meyer's book, "Eric Meyer on CSS" there is a sequal now. A lot of the advanced techniques can be gleaned online at say http://www.alistapart.com/ but I learned a lot working through Eric's book. I implemented many of his techniques as templates for a template gallery which I don't even think exists anymore. So much of the work I did seems to have ended up undeployed as companies go out of business or there are big legal messes or whatever.
To conclude my deranged addition to this mess. You should have started learning CSS and HTML long before now if you are a "web designer". No matter how good the tools get you will always need to look at the code and to do that you need to know how it works. For dynamic sites, be they PHP, WebObjects, WordPress, or GVC.SiteMaker in order to integrate the front end with the back end and the dynamicly generated with the staticly written you need to understand how webpages are actually written, parsed, and rendered. Dreamweaver/Photoshop table based image slicing monstrosity strongweb pagesstrong have been on the way out for a long time and I for one won't miss them. Dynamicly generated, template based strongwebsitesstrong is the direction everyone is going. The days of everyone and anyone calling themselves a webdesigner are done, now you need some scripting ability, and knowledge of gasp emFTPem.
Of course FTP is integrated into most decent webdesign packages but a good stand alone FTP program is still worth the $20 bucks to register in my oppinion. Command lines have their uses, but dragging and dropping is superior I don't care how fast you type.
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