I want to learn web design

if you know the basics of HTML then you are off to a good start. Most editors nowadays will create the page without you having to enter any code at all. The best way to learn is probably to create some basic pages, then look at the code behind them and modify it to see what effect it has.

In terms of software, frontpage and dreamweaver are the two most common. Dreamweaver is pretty much the industry standard, with frontpage frowned upon by most, however for dreamweaver you will expect to pay a fortune, $500+ i think.

Depending on the complexity of your website, you might want to look into scripting, for which you will need either PHP or ASP. Dreamweaver will create simple PHP scripts through drag and drop, but your going to need to learn this. Google for "php tutorials" there are thousands out there, or buy yourself a book.

OOPS forgot the key point of my post (duh!). You cant really learn website design, you can learn techniques and theory, but it all comes from hands on experience, practice and see what looks good together, and make changes until it looks right.

I'm self-taught and have done pretty well with an inexpensive program called "Hippie" (http://www.hippie98.com/index.htm). It's good for folks who want to learn HTML code (unlike Frontpage, which pretty much hides the code from you). The big plus of Hippie is that is side-by-side WYSIWYG - as you type the code you see the results in the side-by-side frame. Very nice feature for those who want to hard code but are still learning. You can download it and try it up to 50 times before you have to register. It has a few wizards, but you really need to learn your HTML to work effectively within this program.

One big way I learned was to analyze the code on sites I liked and pull out the things I wanted to learn. Simple sites work best for this, as the newer sites often uss CSS and link to an external file which contains much of the code.

If you don't know much about HTML, I don't think Flash will help you much. You'll have quite a learning curve ahead of you. I'm not a fan of Flash anyway. One great piece of advice I read once was to always emulate two of the biggest e-commerce players - eBay and Amazon. Neither site uses Flash. Kids like Flash, but I find it annoying.