I've built several commercial sites for businesses with Publisher 2003 and
really haven't found it to lack the capabilities to do anything I wanted it
to do.   It's easy to use, the sites look fabulous, upload is a cinch, and
it's interacted just great with other tools.  I heard the warnings, too, and
ignored them.  :-)

Robin, Congrats. While I prefer Publisher 2000, I think you illustrate that
it is the person wielding the tool, that is more important than the tool.
Clearly from your examples you can build very attractive and effective
websites with Publisher 2003, especially if you don't need anything too
complicated.

I had a local web design company try to sell me on redesigning my site using
Flash and other bells and whistles. Their sample website took close to 4
minutes to load with my dial up modem and their snobbish, arrogant answer to
my criticism was to switch to broadband. Just because you CAN do something,
doesn't mean that you should. I think there is a lot to say for K.I.S.S.

As per your PDF file taking so long to download, depending on which tool you
are using, you can generate PDF files that are much smaller file size and
optimized for the web vs. print. Don Schmidt has said that PDF-XChange
creates much smaller PDF files than most, so if your tool doesn't give you
the option of creating a smaller PDF file, you might check that out.

DavidF