Our group went through painful mistakes during my 8 years of leading web developer. So don't use FrontPage or its kind as visual editor. Also don't use MS-Word and export the word-document as html-page! The biggest drawback is that the generated webpage has directly embedded, proprietary stylesheets, is many times bigger as it should be, chaotic composed and no maintenance possible.
You are currently going the right way: designing it from back end with a clear structure and keep it graphically simple. Make it as xhtml and run it through the w3c-markup validation service, there should be no errors. Don't use css-like-tags and parameters like <center>, <font> <img> <.. width=...> etc. Especially put all CSS-attributes and Javascripts in files and put a link inside the document to that file. Use prototype, jquery or some other javascript-framework to overcome browser-incompatibility.
After that there should be no need to change the HTML itself, only change the javascript (*.js) and *.css-files! For quick working, save your html-page from browser to your local drive. While saving, the browser will change the links in your html-page of your *.js and *.css files to point to your local directory and put them there. So re-open this page in your browser. Now you can load these *.js and *.css files into an editor and change them around (but don't change the html itself!). After ever change, you can just press F5 in your browser to see the change immediately. After you are done with your beautification, you can copy these *.js and *.css files back to your server.
You have the choice: a quick, dirty page with a visual editor or a slower-to-make clean page by hand. (That means for a beginner. I know CSS and JS so well that I can do it faster by hand then with a visual editor).
Just imagine your boss comes one day and tells you to align the text-headers on all webpages to the left instead of middle and change the letter color of brand names from blue to red, because of a new corporate design or anniversary or legal issues. If you have used frontPage to develop all your more than 100 pages, you will need many days to change them one by one in your visual editor, doing a tedious and error-prone task. But for me it's done within a few seconds: In my general css-file which is used for all pages I change only 2 lines: "h1 {text-align:center}" to "h1 {text-align:left}", and ".brandName {color=blue}" to ".brandName {color=red}". In my HTML I have all brand names surrouded with <span class=brandName>. Tell me, which editor can do that?
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