There are several ways to build a website, using a WYSIWYG editor, a site builder, or coding by hand. Of these three options, any professional designer will tell you that hand coding a site is the cleanest, cheapest, and really not that hard to learn the basics.
Here are a couple of references to help you get started with HTML markup and CSS (style sheets):
1)
Full Web Building Tutorials - this is probably one of the best tutorial/reference sites.
2)
HTML Tutorial - Table of contents
3)
CSS Tutorial - Table of contents