So, when I was in high school (College now), I ran my own website. Really small stuff, basically stored my own crap and ran a forum in which my friends from high school posted things on.
I had taken a basical HTML course then and also used Microsoft Frontpage (Came with Office, so I used it) to put it together. It looked pretty decent, but was really a mesh of my really basic undderstanding of html and also how to incorporate other people's designs into my own.
For example, I saw some php forum theme and took it's look to design my website around. So I stole its look to start with, but expanded a lot upon it. I know a bit of what I was doing, but any professional website builder would likely think Im a total amateur.
I don't know how to program javascript, php, perl, or basically any language.
The actual question/asking for advice now that you have some background on what I know
I want to help put together a website for a campus organization that has a pretty crappy template-built website at the moment. Should I learn a lot more about HTML to make something cool or should I get some program like Dreamweaver (is that what people use mostly?) to make something?
People don't actually build real websites all in html anymore, right? Maybe some html editing here and there, but mostly in a program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver?
Posts
I would disagree with that statement. Anyone worth his or her salt creates their website by creating code by hand, or at the very least, using a WYSIWYG editor (like Dreamweaver's Design view) and editing out the excessive code.
Also, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM FRONTPAGE!
The best people do it by hand, so their code is clean, validates, and makes sense.
If you want to do it all well, learn XHTML and CSS. If you want to do it properly, learn a scripting language (such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, even ASP.net) that will let you reuse components, probably driven by a database.
If you want to do it fast, and don't intend to maintain it, just get Dreamweaver and go to town. If you want, you could try using a CMS like Drupal. Or even a wiki.
Also, quite the thing I would had loved to had known about / existed back when I made my high school website.
pbwiki is actually used on our univeristy proper's security page... here.
If you're a pro, you can actually keep a 'development' version that's the actual wiki, and then export the raw html from the php dump. A less sophisticated version involves wget or curl, but I think pmwiki has real backup and export options.