Probably the most powerful tool to use when publishing websites is the Adobe Creative Suite and Macromedia Studio 8 Suite combined. You see, you have Dreamweaver (which is easily the best web editing program available and most powerful) and you have photoshop (which we all know is the best image tool available) and then you have the extras o "spruce up your site" like Flash, and In design and acrobat pro. and Contribute (which allows you to edit pages very easily)...

it all depends on whether you are going to be doing alot of coding by hand or wysiwyg or databases or what not... These two suites combined make one of the most powerful web editing studios available - you just have to learn how to use them!