Help Sifting Through Various Development Styles

Question

I have CS4 and a basic self educated understanding of CSS, HTML, & programs Dw, Fw, Ps, & Ai.  With these top notch programs at my disposal & my addiction to learning new things I've decided to design a custom website for my office.
So far I've followed most of David Powers tutorials on here & have been able to make pretty cut & dry web pages through hand coding.  I was hoping to make a more detailed & modern one.  Through Google searches I found some recommendations of designing the page in Ps & cutting it and saving as HTML & images to load right up to Dw & do the rollover images.  Screenshot of my desing can be seen here http://d.pr/i/gA7y & http://d.pr/i/qqm (rollover).  The only problem now is that in Dw I feel the code is more unfamiliar to work with & I have read comments saying that this technique isn't for final products.
I'm kind of stuck right now wondering if I should start over & if so where?  I want a site that looks like the screenshots, has coding that is managable, and can be great with SEO.

Answer 1

Well first, as good as David's tutorials are I prefer this one for showing people how to go from FW or PS to DW.  The tutorial is in FW, but if you have a basic understanding of Photoshop you should be able to translate it fairly easily.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/dw_fw_css_pt1.html
That is part 1 of the 3 part tutorial.
As an experienced developer when I look at your proposed layout I see a header, footer, menu bar, content area and possibly an image area on some pages.  You have one repeating background image that could be sliced out at 10x10px and repeated.  The only difficult part I see for you is the menu bar.  I would recommend staying away from menu bars that have rounded corners only on the ends.  Or if you are, consider doing away with images and use a CSS container around your menu that has rounded corners.  Just makes things easier and neater.
The last thing I will say, bury that thought of SEO right now.  If all you are worried about is SEO, your website will fail.  Worry about who your target audience is and getting code that validates ( http://validator.w3.org ).  If you can reach your target audience successfully and have good code, then you can start to worry about SEO.  Too many companies try to sell SEO as the end-all/be-all of websites and if that's all you have going for you eventually that website will be exposed for the fraud it is.