Funky Chickens is a great place to learn HTML. That's where I started as well as some of my other webdesigning buddies.

Fateback offers free webhosting. From what I've heard, they're pretty good but I've been having troubles signing up with them. I started out on Angelfire. I prefer angelfire over geocities but angelfire's ads are SO annoying. (I do have a code to remove them though.. ).