Even if you learn HTML and use templates, you certainly don't want to type new pages from scratch. Instead, you want to use a software tool that will do it for you.
There are many tools out there. The one you pick is a matter of personal preference.
Faculty often ask me to recommend a web authoring tool. This has been difficult, because such a tool needs to meet all the following criteria:
I have not found a tool that satisfies all these requirements. However, KompoZer comes close. It doesn't support SFTP at the time of this writing (only FTP) but I imagine this will be added to a future release.
PS: I used BBEdit to create this site.