I’ll definitely add my vote for the suckiness of Frontpage. It really does suck. As far as GUI web design programs go, Dreamweaver seems to be the most popular, but is also pretty expensive.
A couple of weeks ago, i downloaded a copy of Nvu, a freeware program with a WYSIWYG interface. It actually works quite well, and generates pretty decent code. And you can’t eat the price. It would be ideal for a beginner like the OP seeking to create fairly simple html pages.
For the OP:
Even if you decide to go with a WYSIWYG program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage or Nvu, i highly recommend spending some time learning HTML, as others in this thread have suggested.
The principles behind the markup language are very simple, and can be grasped very quickly by most people. Understanding the code really helps, even if you have a GUI program, because it is often necessary to make adjustments to the code to get exactly the results you want.
I used to really love FrontPage. No, I mean it. I was a freelance Web designer, and I made a bunch of money fixing sites that people had designed in FrontPage. The biggest problems I found on the FrontPage sites were:
Didn’t work right on non-Internet Explorer browsers
Didn’t work right on non-Windows operating systems
Code bloat. MAJOR code bloat. Seriously affected load times
Most formatting options forced pages to fixed-width paradigm–content couldn’t gracefully resize with browser window
Regarding #1 and #2, I hear a lot of people say, “So what? The vast majority of visitors to my site use IE and Windows.” I just don’t get those people. Why would you want to lose any amount of revenue (assuming a commercial site) by limiting access to one browser/OS combo? I’ll happily put in the extra time to make sure my sites work on all major browsers.
It would be ideal for a beginner like the OP seeking to create fairly simple html pages.