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If you're thinking about writing some or all of the code for your own site, it's not as difficult to learn as it might seem and there are many suitable books available for learning HTML. The original images on this home page have mostly been prepared by scanning photographs taken with single-use cameras and editing them appropriately. The HTML files so far have been written using a very basic text editor - Windows Notepad. It is generally accepted that HTML generated by web-page design programs takes up a lot more space than if you write it yourself... so if you want to avoid redundant code, slower performance and wasted space then give it a go. Have a look at the source code for this page, and compare it to some others which have been generated by web-authoring programs. See how easy it is to read the simple code?
My own computer system is fairly basic. There aren't many special requirements for preparing material for a home page - a reasonable screen and a decent amount of memory are handy for graphics editing though, and a scanner is useful (as could be a digital camera, if you want to follow that particular path). The information which has come back from my site statistics tells me that most visitors are using 800x600 resolution - this surprised me a bit because I thought most systems would be using higher-resolution displays now. I guess there are still plenty of older computer systems like my own still in use... which is also a good reason to keep web pages simple and reasonably quick to load.
Most of the sections on this site are updated as new material comes to hand, or when inspiration strikes. Currently the entire site contains less than 4 Mb of files so there is plenty of room for new material. So far this home page can be found through AltaVista and its Australian site GoEureka, as well as Google. Also it is listed in Yahoo! and the Geocities Member Pages directory. I would mention that Yahoo! Geocities has been easy to use and a reliable host for my site over the years, as well as being free (on Geocities a small advertisement is shown together with personal sites, in exchange for this free hosting).
I began learning some HTML a while ago, before I even started using the Net regularly. My approach was to find at least one textbook about HTML and just start writing some code, using the examples and a bit of experimentation. The results were immediately viewable with a Web browser - easy to start experimenting. A lot of the graphics were made from original photographs, and subjects were developed around these. Later I found some extra resource material on the Web, such as detailed tutorials about meta-tags and site promotion, and put some of this into use. The home page has basically evolved from there and it has been a lot of fun.
Sometimes I check out other sites with the aim of figuring out objectively what makes them work (or otherwise), whether they are commercial, home-made or whatever. Once you have a basic home page up and running, it's worth taking some time out to do this if you want to refine your home page design. I notice that some commercial site designers are taking a clean-and-simple approach to page layout while others try to cram huge amounts of information into small spaces. Anyway don't be afraid to try new designs - the site which has something a bit different from the rest is likely to be remembered.
I'm also fairly pedantic when it comes to proof-reading. Isn't it always hardest to find mistakes in one's own material, though? Errors can be found on many commercial sites if you look hard enough but as they say - people who live in glass houses should, er, get dressed in the basement. Just for the record: I use a dictionary, a thesaurus and Style Manual (AGPS Press) occasionally, not a spell-checker though. (Many spell-checkers yield US spellings instead of Australian, and there are many differences...)
Okay, now for my personal opinions on a few things related to Web site design, both good and bad. (The Web is like a lot of things in life: if you search for a while you'll find the good, the bad and the downright ugly!)
So there you have it: a few tips which might be worth remembering. Of course style is an inherently subjective thing and you may not agree with my opinions or methodology... but that's okay. Part of increasing one's knowledge is to pick out what is most relevant amongst a whole lot of other stuff. Anyway, it's my home page so of course the editorial content is based on my own opinions: if you make your own then you can do the same thing, so go for it!
Did you ever wonder how to make a subtle background image, just a light texture or similar? All right, I'll reveal the secret. One: put a piece of coarse fabric into your scanner and scan it. Two: lighten the image in your favourite image-editing program until it is almost white and the pattern is scarcely visible. Three: crop it to something around 200 x 200 pixels and save it as a .JPG file. Four: set that file as the background in your HTML code. Too easy - you could scan any of a number of different things (timber, your hand, leather or paper) and apply the same principle.
Lastly, an explanation of the animated Valiant and cycling sequences. (It would have been easier to make a movie file then convert it into an animated .GIF file, but no video camera was available at the time.) I did this the lazy way: having a number of images photographed in sequence then scanning, editing and animating them. If you try something similar, just remember you won't get a scene to appear in precisely the same position in multiple images - processing and cropping tolerances will thwart you. Anyway I decided to include them because I thought they would be good for a laugh! The backwards-riding sequence is genuine but the photographs were taken on separate passes; kerbside markers out-of-shot provided spacing cues. You can see that the sun was setting, too - notice the shadows rapidly changing length.