Just ran across this link explaining the difference between developing the front end and the back end of a website. The “back end” is the “engine”: PHP, SQL, file storage, server interaction. The “front end” is the “body”: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Flash. It gets scary when you have to mix the two, but that’s exactly what AJAX is all about.
It’s worth pointing out that, as the article states in discussing Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and Adobe Pagemill, “As soon as you need the site to fulfill a specific task, these WYSIWYG editors stop being that handy.” And yes, your worst nightmare is to have to take a website done in a visual editor and hack on the code. Glory be, what a mess! As long as a web page’s only job is to sit there and look pretty, a WYSIWYG editor is the way to go… but then, why not just use Photoshop? Freelance web designers see this all the time: the client has drawn up a page in Photoshop, and now wants it sliced-and-diced into a working web page. Experience shows that this doesn’t always have the desired results. It’s like trying to make a banquet out of frozen instant dinners. At some point, those plastic trays and sectioned compartments really start to get in the way.