Things What I LIke To Use
This is mostly a collection of links for myself so I can remember useful sites. Perhaps you'll find them useful too.
MAMP. Run an Apache server on your Mac for quick website testing. Also how to set up virtual hosts in MAMP.
CSS Tricks. Way too useful. I wish I had half this guy's knowledge and savvy. But then again I haven't spent anywhere close to half the time that he has, so I guess we're even.
ColorBlender. Cool way to play with color palettes.
My development environment is pretty piecemeal. Aside from the aforementioned MAMP, which I use for tweak-and-test development, I code in TextWrangler, the free text editor from BareBones Software. It covers the basics to make it easier to code HTML and the scripting language of your choice: somewhat smart indentation and color coding. It's really pretty powerful, with regular expression searching and scripting and everything, but its "Save to FTP" functionality is basic. For easier local/server sync-ing I use Sitecopy, which runs in Terminal. I occasionally run into some glitches though, and then I use FireFTP to shuffle stuff around by hand. Yeah. More difficult than it needs to be. One day, if I find myself keeping up enough projects, I'll switch to Coda. I have such a crush on Coda. I'm way too nervous to talk to it though.
Of course, there's the famous sticky footer technique, which I use pretty much everywhere to keep a standardized footer at the bottom of every page.
You don't hardcode each page, do you? I highly recommend using or developing a template system. The most robust version of an out-of-the-box system would be something like WordPress or another blogging/CMS platform you can customize to your whim. I like to keep things light, so I developed my own. Of course, I have no notes on sources, but I think I started from an example in a PHP book from the library and then extended it as I discovered better ways to do things. You can find a basic walkthrough on the concept here. I think Smarty looks like a pretty cool framework too.