Why wait for lessons? I did it without, in act I ended up learning the whole Maromedia Suite (Now Adobe Collection) (which is a WYSIWYG editor).
HTML will be teh foundation, however learnign HTML these days is a but useless as almost everything uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for smaller file sizes, faster page loads, and MYCH easier sitewide editing.
If you learn CSS, you will automatically learn basic HTML in the process.
I'd suggest searchign out tutorial sites, there are countless numbers of them, but you may want to start with the CDD COnsortium, many links and immense support found there.
In the end, you will find that you can do a lot more, a lot easier by using a good editor, such as Adobe's Dreamweaver.
If you learn Dreamweaver, it is very easy to then go over yor code and actually learn the code in a reverse method. Design the page and tweak the code.
The key and singlemost important part of web design though, is search engine optimization.
Keywords, Alt Tags, body tags etc. need to be weighted and balanced properly, spamming tags just hurts your positions.
I see extremely high end (expensive) websites everyday that are so poorly tagged that they are useless and teh great work is never found by those searching for the information/products they offer.
Even a cheapo, basic page, 'properly' optimized for a search engine will outrank some of the most intricately built pages. I'm sure it ticks off companies when they spend $20K and hundreds of hours designing their website, only to have a free page I built in 1 hour outrank them on Google. :D
FREE SEO is a good starting point, WebPosition Gold (First Choice Software) are great starters for positioning.
Learn code because you will need to understand it, but you can make a lot more money optimizing other people's pages. I quickly gave up designing websites when I found that I could make $1500.00 for each page that hit a top 10 slot in Google, which really takes no time or effort to do.
Get three or four websites ranking well and you can live on (literally)only a few hours work each month.
