Basic web pages are text, and a set of text <tags> that tell the web browser the text's format.
Each tag is just a bit of text with angle brackets around it. The web browsers don't actually show them on the screen (don't worry about the details right now, we'll look at these in more depth on the next page). You can either use software that writes the format tags for you, or software that lets you write them yourself.
Software that writes the tags for you is called a 'What You See Is What You Get' or 'WYSIWYG' editor (sometimes pronounced "WizzyWig").
Microsoft Word has a WYSIWYG capacity - you can "Save to HTML..." and it gives you a webpage that looks a bit like the Word document.
No one should ever use Word to create webpages - the pages can look very bad on non-Microsoft browsers, and at the best look like bad Word docs. Other WYSIWYG editors include...
You can find these and other editors reviewed here. In general, when starting out at least, you're better off not using WYSIWYG editors as the pages they generate generally need adjusting, and to learn how to do this by hand it's better to learn without using them.
WYSIWYG editors make quick but bad, bad, BAD web pages - for real control you still need to write the tags yourself.
To write tags yourself all you need is something that can produce text in one of the standard text formats. Most writing software that will save .txt files will do this.
You can produce such files in Microsoft Notepad.
Start Menu > Run... > type "Notepad" > OK
Alternatively a good text editor with some extra functions is the free Notepad++ which has some added functions (like search and replace). Note that Word is not a text editor; when you save a Word file it contains information to help Word format the text in its own way and isn't saved as a standard text file, even though it may look like one.
Everyone can benefit from knowing something about the formatting tags.
Whether you decide you want to do the formatting yourself or not, it is helpful to understand tags, so the rest of this tutorial will teach you to create your own page tags. If you want to use a WYSIWYG editor in the future, you should read the editor's help and tutorial files to find out about it. For the moment, do everything in Notepad.
If you'd like produce a web page you can see now, open up a text editor and a web browser at the same time. You can flick between them in Windows by using the Alt and Tab keys together. Then follow instructions like this when you see them on the upcoming pages.
Go on to learn about the basic page structure and write your first webpage.