Hello, Dean. I’m late to this thread but I’d like to welcome you to RW.
When I was still working as a programmer, I hand-coded small websites as a hobby. More and more, I found designing websites to be personally rewarding for its creative/artistic/design aspects and decided to start freelancing as a website designer until I finally waved goodbye to programming.
Although I can hand-code, I used a number of web design software for years. When I migrated from PC to Mac, I discovered RW and it’s been a wonderful eight years since.
I think that your training in HTML and CSS will come in handy for tweaking and understanding how to adjust/customize templates, stacks, add-ons, etc. to fit your website’s design requirements.
Among other things, a couple of great bonuses also come with using RW: very helpful developers and the RW community members which, combined, possess tons of knowledge and experience and are so very eager to help. When I’m stumped, in need of answers or advice, I check this forum. I always find that more heads are better than one.
I wish you the best and happy weaving.