I used Microsoft FrontPage to teach myself HTML. It is actually a pretty neat program. You can create pages much as you would a Word document, then click on the HTML page to see the code generated.
If I went to a web page and saw something I thought was neat, I could copy and paste it into FrontPage, then flip to HTML and see the code that was used to generate the page or the part that I was interested in. I pretty much taught myself everything with that program.
Up until MS Office 2000, Microsoft included FrontPage with the Professional Edition. But they stopped including it in MS Office 2003. Now you have to buy it as a stand-alone program. It's a fabulous program and there are tons and tons of ready-made templates available for FrontPage if you don't know html. Well worth it.
If you can use Microsoft Word, you can easily learn Microsoft FrontPage.
The biggest secret to making neat web pages is to use lots of tables within tables. That way you can separate text and images into "sections" on your page and assign different background colours or designs to the areas.