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There has been such an evolution is web design since I started making websites back in 1996. Back then, it was primarily done by coding and it was a hobby usually conducted by college students or programmers. But in 1997, two WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website creation programs came out that "changed the game." Both Macromedia Dreamweaver and Golive Cyber Studio, ironically both are now owned by Adobe, allowed people to develop websites visually. And the core developer of websites shifted from the programmer to the designer. Websites started to look much better and much more "professional." Thus, every company suddenly wanted a website as its own virtual brochure. And with this new need, web design firms sprung up like wildfire. Because each page of your site had to be designed by someone who knew what they were doing, creating a large corporate website was a big expense. It usually meant hiring not only a web design consultant, but an in-house "webmaster" to keep the site updated. But then another evolution occurred. The blog came along and with it the popularity of the content management system (CMS). This did a couple things. First, now you didn't have to know much "about websites" to update the content on your website. And it shifted the code which makes up the design of sites away from each page and into a file (or series of files) called a cascading style sheet. These days the entire design of your site is actually outside your site. What does that mean? It means that you can redesign your entire site by changing one file rather than each page on your site. Obviously, this method makes designing and redesigning websites much cheaper. It has also created new businesses that offered customizable website templates that are cheap and well designed. This is not good for designers. So what do they do? They tell you a lie that has formed the foundation of many a sales endeavor, "you get what you pay for." What they are really saying to you is "expensive equals good."Jeff Gardner, from Smashing Magazine, a website targeted at designers explains why this is a fallacy. "I’m about to make a bold statement. The quality of a design and the monetary cost of producing or procuring that design have absolutely no relationship whatsoever. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, I know," says Gadner in a recent article. "Quality-Price-Ratio (or QPR as it’s commonly referred to) is a concept that is used extensively in the wine trade. In it’s essence it’s nothing more than a measure of perceived value, of the enjoyment you receive weighed against the price you have to pay. Do you feel that the benefit your gained was worth the price you paid? If you don’t, then the product or service has a low QPR. On the other hand, if you feel like you got away with highway robbery then the product or service has a very high QPR. I’ll spare you the metaphysical comparisons between wine and design beyond this one important point: There is no correlation between price and quality when discussing wine or design." Read the whole article here.
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Web/Social Media 
First, a lot of us marketing communications types started developing business websites back in 1995 -- the year Netscape went public... at least that's when my partner and I started. We began by writing html, then a few tools came out -- like ColdFusion -- which made things a lot easier, and finally, like you said, Dreamweaver changed the game by allowing technically inclined writers and designers to develop fairly substantial websites. We still use Dreamweaver to develop sites, as well as WordPress and other tools.
Prior to that we were developing multimedia CD-ROMs using Macromedia Director... which we continued to do until the web came into its own a bit more fully.
Blogs didn't come into the mainstream for quite a while, relatively speaking, and before blogs showed up, Content Management Systems were widely employed on robust, dynamic sites. The early CMS's were all custom-built and were really expensive. As a result, you could usually custom design and build an html site for a fraction of a dynamic site's cost.
People at that time said, "You get what you pay for," and many clients didn't want a "static" html site and decided to pay a whole lot more for a dynamic database-driven CMS site. HTML sites had some distinct advantages over templated sites, and they still do, but the biggest advantage was cost. These days, almost all of those early sites -- both dynamic and static -- are gone. They've been replaced with more up-to-date sites... some of which are dynamic and some of which are static. Because there is no "best way" to design and develop a website. It depends entirely on the challenges being met.
Sometimes, static HTML sites are a fine solution. Sometimes WordPress sites are best. Occasionally you need something a bit more robust like Drupal or Joomla!. And sometimes, the only workable solution is a custom-built web application. Each one of these solutions will come at a different price, but you get what you pay for. And if you need a higher-priced solution to solve your challenge or to position your firm in the way you want it positioned, then you need to pay more.
The ability to develop compelling websites is exactly the same as the ability to write compelling prose or produce compelling graphic designs. Plus, the quality of the way designs and sites are developed varies greatly. While it's true that CSS files control design, there are different ways of producing those files, and some are better (and worth more) than others.
The point is, you have to understand what it is you need. Do you need a $500 website, a $5,000 website, a $50,000 website, a $500,000 website, or a $5 million website? $5,000 should get you a pretty decent website, but if you need a $50,000 site and you only want to pay $5,000 for it, then you will get what you pay for... no lie.