Take a look at Bluefish. It's pretty powerful and should be able to
meet your requirements.

Komposer could be just what you're looking for. I haven't tried it out myself
yet as I am new to Ubuntu and am sticking with Dreamweaver on XP for the time
being, since I look after a larger site for my employer. Komposer seems to
have a good interface and WYSIWYG.
Good luck and, if you try it out, let us know how you got on with it as I would
like to consider switching at some time in the future.

I have used Komposer for a couple of years and like it finding it
adequate for most needs. For extra fancy bits i either turn to line
editing or adding in just a couple of lines within Komposer.

I have used KompoZer and Nvu before that. Read about them here:
http://www.nvu.com/

Also many web hosting sites offer tools and applets that you can add to your
site, from counters and guest books to full blown programs such as Wordpress for
blogging, etc. Wordpress.com allows you to quite easily set up a free webpage
complete with themes and styles. There are many sites such as this.

My hosting site does provide some basic development tools, and I
will likely use some of those when and if I want to insert comment
forms, blogs, or other applets. The basic site designer does leave a
bit to be desired though. Hence my search for something to build the
site offline, learn a little more about underlying coding as I go,
then (hopefully) progress from there.

Thanks for the recommendations for Komposer and Bluefish. I will
give both a test drive, and report experience back to the group.
Will likely be coming weekend before I find time, so I hope no one
wants a review quickly

On Ubuntu you can actually install apache2. This will place a /var/www
directory on your PC. Hitting your locl PC http://192.168.1.11 for
instance from your browser request will result in "It Works", this is
the result of going to the /var/www/apache2 default page. To test and
create a locally accessable page just create another directory beside
the apache2-default and access your new page by
http://192.168.1.11/newstuff/newstuff.html

This is an easy way to play and learn about web pages without first
posting them out on the net, you can do it locally.