I bought dreamweaver at an educational discount when I was in grad school, and I just learned through trial and error. I am sure someone who knew what they were doing could create an amazing site, but I find that mine does pretty well. Its strength is its simplicity. It can be a pain to update since I created it with tables...I don't know any of tricks, so I literally make and place every thumbnail where it should be and create a new page from scratch for every photo. But doing so allows a lot of room for search engines to find the pages, descriptive image titles and so on.
The nice thing about dreamweaver is that it gives you three modes -- design, code and hybrid. You can easily switch back and forth so that you can see the html, as well as just work in design mode. I have no web-design background, so I pretty much only work in design mode, but it is also nice to know that if I ever got off my butt and learned some web-design, dreamweaver can do essentially anything a photographer could want in a website (a non-flash one anyway).