Hi all, wanted to get into web design, nothing too serious just personal sites and design for friends businesses etc.

I have played around with Dreamweaver but I am wondering if starting off using a WYSIWYG is not a very smart way to learn? Should I start off learning to code then learn the shortcut of WYSIWYG later?

Thanks for any advice,

Yes, the best way to REALLY learn HTML and CSS is to hand code. Once you have learned HTML and have a decent grasp of CSS, THEN a WYSIWYG tool like DW can help speed up your workflow.

I started off by using a few WYSIWYGs, but soon realized that if I didn't code by hand, it would be very difficult for me to progress.

Although Dreamweaver is a very powerful and useful tool (I still use it frequently), in order to truly understand its power you need to study HTML and CSS from the ground up. However, I don't think you need to discard Dreamweaver in order to understand HTML. Simply switch to "code view" and forget about the "display view". You should only be using Firefox and other web browsers for testing anyway.

Go download a free template (A GOOD FREE TEMPLATE WITHOUT TABLES!) and have a look at the structure and code. Then pick up some phrasebooks and dig in. Try to change text formatting, or re-align the CSS elements, or maybe just change the header image. I learned what I did from modification (i used to be a free template hoarder!) and by molding the template to how I wanted it.