Hi Rob, and welcome! I would say I'm one of the newbies you speak of ;)
I have yet to find a web design program that wasn't either difficult to use, severely lacking in features or didn't cost the same as the Gross National Product of a small European nation!
My favourite Windows application is Macormedia Dreamweaver, and yes it is extremely expensive.
With Open Source, it looks like I can be more creative and productive at significantly less cost than with Windows.
If by "I have no programming ability whatsoever" you mean you wouldn't be happy writing HTML either then you may struggle to find a decent web design package in Linux, as I have. I'm perfectly happy to write HTML, but there are times when I think a WYSIWYG editor makes me more productive. I've yet to find anything in Linux to completely replace Dreamweaver in that sense - I'm still using specialised text editors.
However, there are some programs you might want to look at. For basic WYSIWYG editing you might find Mozilla Composor which comes with Mozilla useful. It's very basic compared to Dreamweaver but does the job and does it reasonably well.
Specialised text editors like Quanta Plus and Bluefish are the best way I've found to make web pages in Linux. The purists will suggest the vi (or vim) editor.
Let me know if you find anything better!
Sadly, I have yet to discover a really good and stable music sequencing package (a la Cubase) as I am a part time musician. I have just downloaded Rosegarden 4 and will give that a go soon.
I'm struggling to find one of these too. What have you tried? I'm a fan of Cubase but haven't found anything equivelent to this either. I'm interested in a combination of Wave files and MIDI files with a decent mixer to make music. The Skale Tracker (http://www.skale.org) claim to have a working Linux version but I'm yet to get it to do anything useful. It's also not open source. I've seen Rosegarden 2.1, but nothing more recent. This appears to be MIDI only?
Does anyone know of any other applications to try out?