Forum Moderators: phranque
If you want to learn start out right, Coffeecup offers a free version of their Text/WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. The WYSIWYG option allows you to visually place images and text then builds the code for you. Still not ideal but good enough to start out with. There are other similar applications, I've been using that one for 5 years now...
What is important is you can switch to text mode to view the code directly to see how the page has been coded. From there you can build on your new found knowledge and code your own.
I think you will find this not that hard once you get past the basics and have a foundation to build on.