Well, I know for a fact that there's plenty of HTML tutorials out there

There's also some WYSIWYG programs that you could use. (What You See Is What You Get).

I personally use Dreamweaver 8 and PhotoShop CS1

To the untrained eye yes. And I say no more than that.

I know its programming capabilities are limited, but there is a gaming program known as BYOND. People use their coding software (provided in the download package) and publish their games. The results are hit and miss (I particularly like the Naruto games), but through practice and the tutorials provided on their website, you might have some success in learning to code.

Best source of links would Riqimo,/Doc on IRC, is my guess,

A good open source editor for just about anything can be found at http://www.eclipse.org/.  They have plugins for just about any language you could possibly want to code.

As far as what language to learn for the web, the VE sites mainly use Coldfusion and PHP.  To use those languages, you'll need to have a good understanding of HTML.

As far as tutorials go, there are a ton of them on the web; so you'd just have to search for tutorials on the specific language you'd want to learn.  Or even get a book on the languages; which could possibly give you a better overview. 

I don't personally know of any tutorials on the web.  I mainly just use the language specifications when writing code; which will tell you what functions exist as well as what they do.

Coldfusion Docs
PHP Docs
MySQL Docs (database used by the VE sites)

Let me know if you have any questions.

*Cough* Conspiracy theory of The VE *cough* 

*cough* Riqimo is Palpatine *cough*

......I saw nothing.....

Check out w3schools.
http://www.w3schools.com/

THE PAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, for a free WYSIWYG editor, you call always try Nvu.