Not sure if this is the right section to post this question. I know many people here focus their time and energy on tailored solutions, but there is another side of web design many forget.
I was thinking about template solutions and possible websites people use to download and/or purchase their templates. I know of templatemonster and themeforrest, but I am unsure of any other popular template sites.
Ye The rest seam mediocre, and I trying to find more template sources. Everything is either theme forest or template monster. Theme Forest is better than template monster because all their theme are quite new and in-fashion.
In various forums on download sections I have got lots of good template for free on some specific niche. Along with the websites for template you can just have look on those forums as well.
I’ve used some RocketTheme designs in the past (they require a monthly sub for most of their designs though). I’ve looked at Mojo templates for inspiration too
You can use a template site, but your website might end up looking like thousands of others. I found this site dragndropsites.co.uk/ that claims to automatically create custom websites using exai technologies, so on the one hand you don’t have to focus your time and energy and on the other hand you might get a unique website. I would check it out.
In my experience, Dreamweaver is the most comfortable WYSIWYG software that can be used to design as well as edit code for websites or applications. Yes it has few basic Flash buttons that you can instantly use. But to get more interactive or high-end animations you may have to use Flash itself. You can then embed Flash files (swf files) into webpages using Dreamweaver. Frontpage is something I used long time back, but somehow it didn’t give me that much motivation to explore creativity! You can surely use it as a practice-tool though and then move to higher end packages!
As for playing around with purchased templates, it depends on how the template was created. If it is html, you can used Dreamweaver. If it is the flash content that you need to manupulate, then you need Flash!! For the kind of presentation items you have mentioned, if you are looking for colorful still images, you may create using Photoshop or if you are planning for animations, best is using Flash!
Flash and Dreamweaver are Macromedia products & Photoshop is Adobe product. Check their websites to procure Trial versions to see if this is what you are looking for!