best and easiest current workflow to design a website

Hello to everyone, I have design some websites in the past:

www.cancun-condorentals.com
www.vamonosacancun.com
www.yardglass.com

but its been a long time since I made one. web design is not my main interest, I just did them to get some money. while learning and researching to make this websites I learned a lot of things but at the same time I ended up having other questions. Now Im going to start doing more websites, and I want to make them better. So in order to not repeat the same mistakes I did for the first websites here is my question, I hope someone could help:

Whats the best workflow of software you reccomend to make a website? if its only going to be an information website. (no database etc) Im asking this because for the websites I did in the past I had this weird problem, the way they loaded in browsers was very weird, like fragmented, and very slow even though the site itself wasnt as heavy and the hosting was good. (if you visit the websites youll see what I mean)

If you dont notice anything weird, I would just like you to reccomend me a pipeline. for example: dreamweaver for blablabla > flash for blabla > photoshop for blabla etc. Im looking for the fastest and cleaner look as possible.


anyway, any tip will be appreciatted.

anything will be appreciatted......any suggestion?

Ok, just from loading the sites on a broadband connection it takes to ****ing long. This obviously means either your code or your files for making up your layout need some serious reworking. Find ways to reduce filesize. That's always something that bugged me about people who make huge graphical sites, they don't take into account other people's computers and how they display things. I don't care how some have been taught that memory is no longer a premium the way it used to be when one only had 64K to work from. A program or website of any kind that is as small as possible will always be a site someone would want to use over one that is a helluva lot slower.

displaying a site.. memory usually is NOT a problem.. but internet connection is.. i'm pretty lucky to be on a 500kb/s connection.. but not many ppl i know has it so try to use XHTML/CSS to do heavy lifting, use images springly.. only use them if they make a huge difference

software packages i recommmend:

dreamweaver MX 2004 - work out the basic design (XHTML)
Style Master - do the CSS files (dreamweaver does a good job too)
Zend Studio - get the php stuff outta the way
PHPmyAdmin - do ur mysql tables..

photoshop - DO NOT do slice and dice in this.. it'll make ur code so messy and large.. so i recommend get the basic design done on here, and do the html, and just cut the images u need..

i donno.. does that sound good? those are what i usually use..