i whole heartedly agree, hand coding is by far superior. you can't find an editor that can make as clean, concise, and quick loading as hand code. i started the very same way in notepad. i do admit to using dreamweaver nowadays, just for the color coding. i follow a similar process to creating my pages, though i start in photoshop and do the complete layout there. then i set guidelines as my cut lines for each seperate image (and define whitespace), and use different layers to create rollovers and such. good luck with your coding!