Unless you break out of the WYSIWYG-user's mentality, you will always be restricted in what you can create. Too many beginners go straight to FrontPage or DreamWeaver and never really learn how to code and design. When things go wrong they don't have the skills needed to fix the mistakes their editors have left them with, and give up.
Hand coding in a text-editor (like HomeSite or even trusty NotePad) means you know your code much better and so can find problems and edit smaller things. You have much better control over your design. You're closer to your code and are able to incorporate things like CSS more easily. Visual editors also output very bloated code with lots of unnecessary font tags and paragraphs etc. Your pages will download faster if you code efficiently in a text-editor.
It's never something anyone who has used a WYSIWYG editor wants to do, as at first it looks like a much slower, laborious way to design pages. You're going to have to get past this barrier — you'll eventually come to love the advantages hand-coding gives you.