My HTML coding weapon of choice is the Allaire suite of programs [HomeSite, Cold Fusion, et al]. It lets you write the code, and it will close tags for you if you're really lazy...but at least you get to write your own code with no bloat.
One of my first jobs as a web developer was to clean up FrontPage generated code because this company wanted to put everything on compact disk for a business app they were developing [granted, everything would have fit on the 650M disk anyway, but file copying time would have been lengthy]. I took 4M+ web and crunched it down to just less than 1M.
Just like building a rocket, when you build a webpage, keep it simple, even when you're trying to be complex. My tendency would be to warn against cutting and pasting someone else's source code without knowing what it means simply if its doing something you don't want it to do, you're not going to know how to fix it.
One piece of advice I got early on in my web coding "career" was to remember the newspaper publishing principle of what appears "above the fold". In web terms, this is what first appears on a user's browser window before they even scroll down. You don't want to put any hyperlinks above the fold on your front page because if a user clicks on a link before reading the whole front page, they will have gone past a bunch of other stuff without ever having seen it.
As for graphics, jflis is absolutely correct; you don't want to put inline some image that's going to take more than about 5 seconds to load [on a 28.8K modem line, that would be anything bigger than ~145K]. In fact, your whole page shouldn't take more than 15-20 seconds to load. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator is what many professional web graphics people use to optimize graphics.
As for PDFs, Word has a feature that let's you save *.docs in PDF format, right?