Col Tisdale,
I've had a geocities site for some time, the ads are a pain but it's free. When I changed my ISP to Comcast they offered free webspace that does not have ads so I have moved some of my sites there. Those sites also support FTP uploading which I've found is a bit faster than the geocities file manager.
As far as learning html I would suggest two sites
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/
I used the first one extensively when I was first learning and have used the second recently. I'm no expert but I learned enough to set up several sites and am now trying to rewrite them to comply with the latest html codes. I think you'll find either one useful as both have sample code for you to copy and play with.
You can use Notepad or Wordpad, they come with Windows to start writing your html code but they are rather simple editors. Once you learn enough to do some websites you might want to look into a better text editor. I use Textpad as it has several useful features. I have mine set to show the keywords in different color text which helps me locate errors in my code. It also has a Find and Replace feature that is very helful when moving webpages.
If you need any help with specific things I'm sure if you post something at one of the Tavern's here someone will assist you. I was fortunate enough to get some assitance from other members here when I first started.
Gen. Ken Miller
Army of the Shenandoah
