Software to help me build a new simple/modern/professional website?

Try http://www.squarespace.com

Dreamweaver is a decent WYSIWYG website creator. It even comes with templates that start you off with non-garish designs.
Though that could depend on your definition of garish!

It’s not cheap though.

Dreamweaver is great, but it is kinda outdated. It will not create modern nor professional websites. To create professional websites, the best thing is to learn html. Sorry, but that’s just how it is :)

The question is; what does your employee website need to do? DW is fine if you’re creating static client-side HTML/CSS, but if you want your users to be able to submit forms of data to a database you’re gonna need server-side code, and that is a whole other ball of yarn.

If that’s the case you’ll want to save yourself the trouble of learning to program and check out CMS software which will run on your web-server and provide most of the server-side logic needed to create forms and database views. Drupal is the most popular, followed by Joomla. Both are PHP based which means a lot of web hosts support them. There are myriad choices though, and all are a little too one-size-fits-all for me, but I’m a coder :-)

Finally let me suggest that you consider a hosted-blog platform like Wordpress, Blogger, or my favorite; Tumblr. These sites will let you customize the HTML/CSS appearance as much as you like, and provide basic blog posting, commenting, and moderation capabilities which are all that 9 out of 10 sites really need. Widget services like Disqus, GetSatisfaction, Polldaddy and others are making it less and less necessary to write and host your own application code. Just mash together some HTML embed codes and you can have a really powerful site in no time!

Good luck!

Joomla, Joomla, Joomla. Little or no coding experience needed to create a very interactive site. Best of all, it is free.

No one mentioned http://nvu.com/ ??? It is almost like dreamweaver BUT free.