Well, there is way to much for me to explain in a post. But heres the basics,
HTML is the language which tell your browser how to display information. This is good to use for a basic websites.
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, allow someone to define an element once, and not have to constantly repeat it in the HTML.
CSS is now becoming very popular, and will make designing templates easier and much faster.
The way your browser defines an element is with a tag. A tag is <TAGELEMENT>followed by content or more HTML and then </TAGELEMENT>. You will need to know a few of them (frontpage should do most the work).
Code:
<b>THIS TEXT WILL BE BOLD</b>
Images are always great to see on a site, so make sure you have some. Again frontpage or whatever your using to edit the HTML should do most the work putting these in your site.
There are usally 2 types of modes to edit your html in. Theres the
code view, which is all the coding for your page, and then theres the
"WYSIWYG" or "What You See Is What You Get". The WYSIWYG is easier to use and understand, and is a good place to start out for people new to web design.
A very good site for more in-depth explination of all this is
www.w3schools.com and of course the forums here are always open, and there are many people who are here to help you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask anybody on here, Im sure they'll be more than happy to assist you.
Hope that this helped you in some way
-Dizzie