AerBabe,
There are three guides to HTML available on-line at the W3C web site:
Basic Html,
Advanced Html, and
Style Sheets. These form a good introduction if you want to try and understand HTML. There's also an
authoring guidelines document which you might find useful. However I agree that you're probably better off with a design tool such as dreamweaver.
You might find it worthwhile having a browse through the computing magazines in your local W H Smiths, as there are quite a few devoted to producing web sites, and they often have cover CDs with free web site creation tools on them (beware of the ones with a cover DVD unless you've got a DVD reader on your PC).
Brooklands
PS I suppose the purists would say that you should be learning XHTML rather than HTML.