For people new to HTML I would recommend Nvu. This open source HTML editor is available at
http://www.nvu.com/
It has a pretty nice layout and things are fairly intuitive. HTML may look like giberish at first but it is very simple once you become familiar with the tags and how HTML documents are laid out. A great tutorial (where I learned years ago) can be found at
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/ Good luck =)