I have mixed feelings about web authoring tools. When used to convert a simple text document quickly into a basic HTML file, they can be quite helpful. There's no reason to waste one's time simply inserting a bunch of paragraph breaks into a long document in order to format it for the web. However, the more complicated your page design, the more likely the web authoring tool will cause you trouble. If you're using sophisticated layout and design, many of these tools will look great in the program which created them, load very quickly, etc., and then suddenly, you've got this perfect page, right? Well, no, not really. Looking great is only half the battle. A lot of the authoring tools out there generate code which is cumbersome and annoying, using such things as compound tables, which greatly slow down the page loading process. I once visited a page designed in Microsoft FrontPage 3.0 which, even when I didn't load the images, took three minutes to load, only because of the compound tables. In fact, some tools can make a page look great on one browser, but absolutely hideous on another. Furthermore, if you ever need someone to make modifications to your pages down the line, the code generated by web creation tools can be hideously complicated to read. You could easily end up wasting time and resources paying somebody to redo code from scratch because the original code is too confusing to use effectively. The other problem is simply in their flexability. There's nothing you can create using a web developing tool that you can't create better and more efficiently by hand, and it's not as though HTML is that difficult a scripting language. I'll throw in a music metaphor here: Web authoring tools are sort of like music synthesizers. Yes, you can make a keyboard sound something like a sax, and you can get some results out of it. But what you can do with it is nothing compared to actually playing the sax. Synthesizers, however, will also be much better used in the hands of masterful musicians than they will in the hands of beginning keyboard students. So I guess I'm not saying that they should never be used. What I'm saying is that using them shouldn't be treated as a substitute for genuine skill and knowledge. They'll do in a pinch but it goes back to that difference between doing what's sufficient and doing what's really great.