Chris, when I thought I wanted to make a web site, I found this link
http://www.merlet.com/. They had and probably still do have tutorials in using HTML. I learned enough to be dangerous, and really got started by copying the source of a website I liked and modifying it. Now, I just copy a page of my own, and modify it with whatever I want to put on it. I got fairly adept as coding HTML, but haven't gotten into Java and some of the more sophisticated code. Nor do I do fancy tables, but could if I wanted to start learning more techniques. My site has over 80 pages on it now, and I've been working on it for 6 or 7 years.