What are the three best website creation programs?

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I would personally have to add to the throng that suggest learning the actual HTML/CSS (and ideally PHP/Perl/Python/&c) and coding it with a text editor.

Personally, I use Emacs.

This is just a school project, not a business website. It doesn't have to be super-fancy. I say just use webs.com. Heck, when I ran for webmaster of my theatre department. and didn't have the time to learn or bother with html, I used it and won by a landslide. Everyone thought it was awesome.

And thus knowledge and skill with HTML contracts further still...
It worries me that pushing a few brightly coloured blocks together is considered constructive behaviour, yet it's something any biped could be trained to do.
Where's the skill? Where's the inventiveness? Where's the understanding of what is being done?

I just ran the home page of webs.com through the Unicorn validator at w3.org. There was no character encoding declared in the document, and besides that fault it had 7 errors and 2 warnings in the HTML, and 34 errors and 80 warnings in the CSS.

This shows sloppy coding if this is their home page and they claim to be web site creation gurus. Some of the HTML is just plain sloppy, and some of the CSS is proprietary code for a particular browser, so it is unlikely that any web site you create from this site would be cross-browser compatible, or accessible to those with disabilities (which is the LAW in many nations for business and government web sites at least, and good practice for everyone).

By way of contrast, every one of the more than 200 pages of my personal web site passes the "strict" level of validation for HTML and CSS. Of course I had much help from different sources and I've been fiddling with it for more than ten years. One can't be expected to learn proper HTML and CSS on short notice for a school project. Based on the results of the validator test though, I think there are better choices for instant web site creation than webs.com. If someone were to view that theater page you made using a different browser, or a screen reader for a blind person, they might not think it was so awesome after all.

Not everybody has the time or interest to learn HTML and CSS. And proper coding can be thought of in a sense as pushing brightly coloured blocks together, blocks of code such as elements nested properly, with attributes, etc. Also, I don't need to know everything about the physics and mechanics of how my car works in order to drive it to the store, although that does make it more likely I could repair it on the road if something broke, and understanding things better is fun for its own sake.

I am not opposed to the idea of software that makes web site creation easier for people. Those so inclined can learn more and make their designs stand out from the herd. What does bother me is that most instant web site creation software produces bloated code frequently riddled with errors and sometimes with proprietary crap.

If someone could produce software that spits out valid HTML and CSS code, cross-browser compatible and accessible to those with disabilities, that would be wonderful.

I'm grateful for such things. I'm also quite happy that I don't have to assemble my bus before I use it to travel into town.

No really. That's just writing code tidily.
I'm referring to the practice of pushing together pre-assembled black boxes, with no interest or understanding of what they do.
That's my point. Poorly conceived crap becomes the accepted norm and the correct application and knowledge of the defined syntax becomes 'difficult' or 'unnecessary' as a result.

Mixed metaphors.
You don't have to write a public web page before being able to use it.

I mean, I wouldn't want to have to know how to code in order to make my blog occur.

Maybe I don't actually understand what you're talking about. I'm not techie. In which case, shut up Moog.

But you're using a product to display a blog, not creating it.
Same as I'm only moderately interested in the search algorithms Google uses but I need have no understanding of them to use Google. If I wanted to write a replacement for Google then I would need to understand search algorithms to be able to write effective replacements. Alternatively, I could find a bunch of poorly written libraries and stick 'em together, then wonder why my Google replacement performs so badly.

Never!

I must concur with Cornflake.

You think I should never shut up?

Some of us have to work in the real world where the company browser was only just recently updated to IE 7. This means all of our internal web apps, must function on IE 7.

Standards-compliance helps a lot, but there are still strange issues that must be addressed because of IE 7. Liked IE deciding that a PDF was in a different security zone than our app, and therefore blocking it from loading, even though it was being served from the same server as our app. I don't recall what we had to do to fix this, but it was a hack.

As far as the best software for creating websites, I'd have to say Netbeans followed closely by Eclipse. Spring Roo is also very helpful.