Hans Rasmussen

YES, SharePoint Designer serves a purpose. However think for yourself a bit before you decide to make your changes to a page with SharePoint Designer. The minute you made changes to a page it is unghosted and saved in the database. If you provision these changes to new web sites you will struggle if you need to make new changes to the page. The changes will not cascade and you’ll need to update each site manually and there can be MANY of them. Making a feature that will help you deploy design changes is one solution because you can automate the process with stsadm commands. However I also found this little interesting approach I’d like to share http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/02/28/more-sharepoint-branding-customisation-using-javascript-part-3/ which allows you to make changes but still keep the pages ghosted.