Do you use a decent HTML editor? It saves you a lot of time if you can simply click the tags you want to use (at least in the beginning, later you'll notice you do everything by hand). WYSIWYG editors suck, you never get what you see (at least not in different browsers) and they produce tons of code for the simplest things, maintaining that code will be a b***h.
I used to use 1stPage, it's (IMO) a pretty nice freeware HTML-editor, easy to use, you can click the tags, color-coding etc. Still plain HTML but just a few little tools to make life easier.