If you want something without coding, take a look at homestead.com. I used it for years before I learned how to code.
I consider Dreamweaver to be the best but only when you know how to handle it for designing websites. It definitely comes with whole lot of features but it goes with a saying that the less you use those advanced features the good your web development is . This is because of the fact that you should know it very well that what you dreamweaver is doing under the hood. Its always a best practice to develop in coder mode rather than designer mode, otherwise you may end up with several non-semantic codes which is not a good practice.
i use templates and NVU all i do is to import the templates in NVU and edit them and that makes web design simple and easy for newbies i also use dreamweaver and joomla (content management system)
I will recommend Adobe Dreamweaver. This software has not only been designed with advanced level users in mind but also for beginners. Simple and complex websites can be designed using a point and click method.
For image / graphic creation and or manipulation, Photshop is great!! There are also GIMP and a cloud based tool @ Aviary ( which is pretty cool once you get used to using it... Dreamweaver is useful, but be sure to analyze the code in "code view" to make sure that it's clean and without the added and unneeded tags or inline styles!! Cheers!~
notepad!!! Actually I use Visual Studio since I code in .NET... and find the HTML designer to do exactly what a HTML editor needs to do. It has come a long way since the first releases of .NET. Microsoft Web Expression is pretty much the HTML designer engine that Visual Studio uses.
The quickest way to build a site is to use Wordpress and invest in a good theme but overall, I'd recommend Dreamweaver.