I selected a development tool to produce my web site. It was interesting to review the W3C and HTML material so as to gain an understanding of where it all came from and an appreciation of what Sir Tim Berners-Lee did apart from opening the Olympic games. I will go back and review these sites later. (g)vim, emacs and LibreOffice Writer/Web did not seem immediately accessible enough to me as a beginner. SeaMonkey appears to be a good free package. I selected Dreamweaver as it was available free on a trial basis, appears to be an industry standard and is simple enough for both of my daughters to use it at school. Utlimately it will cost around £100 to buy a Student and Teacher copy.
I started working through a series of tutorials for Dreamweaver. These are well written and the concepts are conveyed in written terms and through the use of a practical example. The tutorials take you through the construction of a basic web site, html coding and css styling. Once you are confident you can re-run through the tutorials but substituting in your design requirements. As you gain more confidence you see additional features you can add and start to settle on a preferred method of working. I would say the package is not competely intuitive, but if you are prepared to spend time looking at code to understand its function then you will be rewarded relatively quickly.