I am a newbie/oldbie website developer in a sort of unique point in my
website development 'career'.  I have been using Corel Paint Shop Pro
and Netscape Composer as my main tools.

Basically I start with a template (bitmap of my website), use Corel
which allows me to slice that template how I want and create an html
table.  Then I add links and edit HTML using Netscape Composer. Very
crude, but somewhat effective.

I know there are better, more effective tools.  I just would like some
advice before I go out and spend a lot of money.  Also, I am
interested in learning website development as a career.  I am an
engineer by training, I know C/C++ as well as some other languages.
Of course I know HTML, and I have a little tiny bit of experience
(mostly just from some tutorials I've read) about PHP, MySQL, etc.

So my question is where to start?  I basically have two goals:
1) To be able to quickly and easily develop my own ecommerce websites.
2) To learn marketable website development skills so maybe I can get a
real job doing this someday.

I was looking at templatemonster.com, and most of their templates say
you need Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop.  I really don't want to
spend $800 on this though.  I guess if I have to I will, but can
anyone recommend a cheaper way for me to achieve my goals?