I don't have any suggestions for wysiwyg development in the PHP/Apache world, other than a text editor in one hand (e.g. Notepad++ or UltraEdit) and browsers to test your code in another!
For this environment it depends on your focus. If you're going for lots of glitz on the client side you'll be using a lot of javascript, probably with a framework such as jQuery or Prototype or ..., and you're not going to find tools that will allow you to single-step code or such except for the Firefox plug-ins. (Well, you may find others but they'll be put to shame by Firebug.
) So on the client side you'll really only need simple HTML and CSS helpers and a text editor is probably fine for that, although again Firbug or the WebDeveloper plug-ins work well.
If you're going to be doing mostly server-side development and the client side is going to be very simple (basic forms and relatively static HTML pages), then your server-side environment will dictate your tools. Will you be using .NET or JEE on the server? Or something else? I don't use .NET (and I'll avoid the flamebait comments
) but on the JEE side it's tough to ignore the free Eclipse platform with a few plug-ins.
It sounded like the OP just wanted a simple program to help with page layout. Get MS Publisher. The results won't be anything great and your web site won't scale up to more than 20 or 30 pages worth a darn, but it'll be easy to use and probably fairly comfortable as it's a MS product. For example, my wife gets along just fine with Publisher until she wants to do something
other than page layout. Then I have to explain how she needs a different tool. At that point she usually decides she didn't really need that feature anyway.
