Isn't a large part of web design about understanding the underlying technologies, because that's the medium we are working with here. People who create great websites (& not just draw pretty pictures) have that special combination of creative vision, technical understanding & an understanding of how users interact with a screen based environment.

Take a good print designer for example, they don't just use photophop & Quark (or whatever) & thats their job done. If they are good, they truly understand the materials they are working with - how inks interact with certain papers to achieve a particular effect etc.

Complex applications like Dreamweaver have a tendency to hide what's going on in the background & remove the designer from truly understanding this medium. I would argue that my web design skills improved no end when I finally left Dreamweaver & just used a combination of BBEdit & Transmit.

So a CSS design tool eh? Perhaps good for a quick mock up, but aren't they always going to suffer from the same type of problems? Forcing you to work in a particular way & making you constantly battle with what what you want to achieve & how the application does things. I wish I just taken things more slowly & gone the plain text editor route from the start...

To avoid "A total new redesign":

A. Create your website for a standards compliant browser.
B. Regularly check the site across other standards compliant browsers.
C. Test against i.e. last.
D. If there are problems with i.e. then "special case" an extra style sheet specifically for i.e. with code to fix the problems.

This simple methodology has relieved many frustrations I had with web-design & means you don't have to resort to a total re-design or ugly hacks in your main style sheet.

Also, having an effective bug checking methodology is vital i.e. Pair down code to the minimum for a bug to be apparent, so you REALLY understand whats going on then:
"trying to get something to work that you just cant find out why it wont "
Is never an issue. Otherwise when you re-do things, its all hit and miss & you can't make informed decisions...

Have you looked at this app:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12394

It can parse/display php/html as you type.

Will

Westciv's Style Master gives you your choice of using panes that are code-only, layout only or both. You just enter the values for each property in the appropriate slide-out palettes. I find the layout panes a bit slow, though and use it ocassionally. It's still very easy to use and is a great tool for beginners and advanced CSS designers.

Layout oriented web editors like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or Pages will never help the non-web-savvy person design a good website. Why? Because HTML isn't a layout language like PDF. It's a logical markup language.

To make a web editor that an average user can produce good, compliant XHTML and CSS with, you need to drop the page layout paradigm and replace it with a content-oriented and structure-oriented paradigm. That means:

1. Getting the user first to think about content and the semantic relationship of the page components. A new type of interface will probably be needed to take care of this.

2. Getting the user to tell the program, in logical terms, how the page items should flow. The interface should let someone do this without requiring knowledge of HTML's limitations.

3. Giving the user comfortable style controls and tools to apply once the above steps have been completed.

So far, no program has been up to this challenge.

PS: If this website is going to insist on logging in for comments, it should really redirect you back to the article you were reading after you log in. It's poor interface design to kick you out of the article you were trying to comment on.