Website design packages such as
Microsoft Frontpage
or
Dreamweaver
are substantial software packages that can help us assemble our website without ever having to know any HTML whatsoever. With simple drag and drop interfaces, logo and banner creation tools, search engine optimization. Some packages can even help with domain registration, submitting your page to the search engine and will generally come with extensive documentation on how to create your website.
Obviously these website design packages are more useful if you're planning on creating multiple websites rather than just one.
The cost of the website design packages varies greatly and some can even be downloaded for free. It comes highly recommended to download one or two free packages and play around with them to identify what specific needs you have and to see if you actually require anything more than a free package (don't worry, most people don't).
Use a Website Template
Templates are practically complete websites that only require you to add your own content before the website is ready to go. Template designers offer their services for minimal fees and can often deliver the finished template in a very short time.
The template can be considered the golden middle road in hiring a professional, buying a package or building the entire website yourself. Website templates will require a tiny bit of understanding of HTML code that is explained everywhere throughout the web in so-called tutorial sites. This may sound daunting at first but the knowledge required to fill up a template is so small that it becomes well worth the hour it takes to learn how.
Templates have the advantage that they are 100% re-usable for any future sites you may have planned and add the advantage of uniformity to your sites that is often hard to recreate through design packages.
Do it yourself
Without doubt the most time consuming process to creating a site and building a website yourself will definitely require a lot of HTML. Unless you plan on investing heavily in tools (which will of course cost a lot of money) you can create fully functional websites with a little knowledge of HTML and notepad (or any other text editor for that matter).
Conclusion:
Once the basics of HTML are learned creating websites becomes a simple matter. Unfortunately building websites yourself will create the need for tools to make your life easier (making sites manually is a very time consuming process) and is definitely not recommended if you only need a single site.
