Learning to use HTML while attempting website design on the fly can be a monumental and intimidating task.  When planning a project, it’s usually best to first do just that, plan.

You don’t need advanced technical skills to make a blueprint.  You just need vision, creativity, patience and the right tools.  Wireframes Magazine chronicles many simple ways to organize your ideas into a blueprint for a website.  There are so many methods that you can choose the one (or several) that works best for you.

Once you are able to illustrate your plans with a basic wireframe, you can target specific manageable elements to implement yourself, or easily communicate your ideas to a potential designer, developer or partner.

Try some of the tools, come back, and let us know how they worked!