You should give us a little background to who you are, what you are trying to accomplish, and the details of your specific situation. Are you a beginning web designer?
For one, you don't have to use a web page design program. But if you don't, you'll have to figure out how to write HTML on your own.
I typically upload my web content via SFTP, but most beginners tend to use FTP. EFTP is advertised as being as secure as SFTP, but faster like FTP.
Many web hosting companies (like mine) run Linux on their servers. An advantage of this is that it is easy to give users command line access through a shell.
As far as a "simpler way", it depends on what you mean by "simpler". It is possible to make scripts (using say, rsync) and SSH keys to make uploading content very simple and quick. However, that would require learning some things about how scripting works.
PerlCoder (http://indicium.us)