The simplest form of HTML pages, also called static HTML, can be created by anyone with a text editor. For example, Windows users could use the built-in Windows Notepad application to create web pages. Although you could use this application, there are other HTML editors available which are much easier to use. Notepad2 is a free, lightweight editor that includes syntax highlighting for a number of programming languages including HTML. A more comprehensive editor is Arachnophilia, which is built using Java so that it will work on a number of different operating systems.

Most word processing applications, like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice provide a way to save regular documents as HTML documents but they usually contain a lot of extra code to support the formatting you have used.

Quite a few of the web hosting companies offer site building tools but you will quickly find them limiting. See Yahoo! GeoCities or Google Sites.

Even if you decide to purchase a software package to assist you, I recommend that you learn at least the basics of HTML coding.

The following are some commonly used text editors that may be used to create web pages (must know HTML):

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web authoring tools