sometimes i start out with plain ol' html pages to create the skeleton of my site .. such as table sizes, colors etc.. this is probably what you are using dreamweaver for...
i don't see why you couldn't use dreamweaver to frame out your site and just put php in where you need it.
dreamweaver puts quotes on everything so just remember if you have to take a bit of html into php, you will have to escape every single quote with a backslash. i.e.
echo "<table border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\">";
php is just pre-processing your html anyway, .. hope this helps.
