hi learningmatt,
There are tons of tutorials on the web to help you learn both
HTML as well as
PHP.
I too am teaching myself web design right now. The way I got started was by Googling
beautiful websites. Then I went to many (perhaps hundreds!) of these websites, and if I liked what I saw, I would go to View-->Page Source in my browser and take a look at the code that powered that page.
After I discovered that most serious web developers still "hard code" their sites rather than using programs like Dreamweaver, etc, I downloaded
TextPad and got started building a website.
I don't know how most people do it, but for me it was easiest just to completely copy the code from a site that I liked, paste it into Textpad, save it as index.html, and then start editing it to learn how different things worked.
After I got some sembelance of a webpage together, I decided I wanted to share my site w/ the world so I downloaded and installed the
Apache Webserver on my machine and got a free domain at
.co.nr
Anyway, this is what I've got so far:
http://www.jeremydean.co.nr/
If you can tell us more specifically what you're interested in creating, we may be able to better assist you. Hope I've pointed you in the right direction...