How to make a web page
You need to do two things to make a web page. If you want others to see it you will have to find somewhere to 'host' your page, also you will have to write it. This involves having something to say, which is not in the scope of this document.
Making a web page
Pages viewed in a web-browser are text files which contain instructions on how to construct the page, written in a mark-up language, either HTML or XML. There are many piece of software to construct your page, ranging from your favourite text editor to specialist wysiwyg tools, such as Microsoft's front-page, word?!, macromedia's dreamweaver, bluefish. There are also tools to publish online with very little knowledge of mark-up language, such as blogs and wiki's.
wysiwyg tools are produced to simplify creation of the web pages without the need to know about how to write mark-up language, as such it is possible for anyone familiar with how to use a GUI to construct a web page in the same way they can create a document in a word processor or graph in a spreadsheet.
HTML is written in ASCII characters and therefore can sometimes be read by humans. If you keep it simple it is easy to write code in html that is readable by humans and computers to create a web page in the browser. Many pages containing useful information are purposely written in vanilla html, with sparse graphics, this is the principle of KISS (keep it simple stupid), this is successful because it makes maintenance of the page very easy as no special tools are needed, and it is easy to read the code in any browser.
The page you are reading is written in a simple text editor, but uses style sheets to make it look fancy, and to create the menu bar. I have used css style sheets to separate the style from the content to an extent. This was done to allow me to create pages which I find attractive, which conform to web standards, which are easy for me to create and maintain.
Learning HTML
Buy a book, take a course, read the web, look at other web pages.
Example webpage (valid xhtml 1.1)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Minimal XHTML 1.1 Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a minimal <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11">XHTML 1.1</a> document.</p>
<p>
<a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer"><img
src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml11"
alt="Valid XHTML 1.1" height="31" width="88" /></a>
</p>
</body>
</html>
Finding a Host
If you are a associated with a university it is possible there is some facility here to allow you to make your own page, although what is on offer will vary. At Cambridge we are lucky to have a student run machine (which is run by a society), http://www.srcf.ucam.org/
There are a number of websites which will provide you with space to build your website for 'free', often these will carry advertising or be tied to some over service, for example an ISP may provide space as part of your internet access. Examples are yahoo and lycos, my first site was hosted on yahoo, but I got annoyed by the advertising on my site, also It was limited to 100 Mb and I wanted to show photographs, but these services are useful for your initial experimentation.
Many subscription services are available, ranging from hosting a page, hosting a domain to renting a machine or co-locating a machine owned by yourself at a facility that provides good access to the internet. These facilities are provided by hosting companies (lycos, memset, etc) and many domain registrars (e.g. 123-reg.co.uk supply hosting as part of a packages of services.
blogs
In a blog you have an interface in the web-browser and you just type the new content. Alot of the hard work has been done for you already. Examples are wordpress.com, blogger.com, typepad.com. Sign up and start typing, they should have guides on those sites.
Links
My page of computing links contains information about html and many links about css