While there have been graphical web design tools available on the Windows and Mac markets for a while, most of these tools won't let you configure and customize your code to the degree that doing it from scratch will. In most cases, when you move from handwritten code to graphically-assisted HTML design tools, you sacrifice a lot of the control of your site in order to make everything faster and easier to manage.
Publisher is an impressive bridge between hand-coding and graphical web design tools.
In fact, the degree of control is so high that it helps if you have some familiarity with HTML and the different tag settings before you start using the application. If you have a moderate level of familiarity with the HTML 3.2 specification, and you're a visually-oriented person who prefers seeing what they're building as they build it, HomePage Publisher will be a fine addition to your web design toolbox. HomePage Publisher might look more like a simple word processing application than it would a web design tool. It's set up with the standard two-row button bars at the top of the page, containing all the common tools you'd expect in a word processing app. With the click of a single button you can define a word or a line of text as a hyperlink, insert a GIF or JPEG image, or even insert a web plug-in or Java applet.