I use Notepad or Wordpad to code HTML by hand -- yes, the long slow stupid way. It's not hard, but you probably don't want to commit yourself to doing that.

In the past, I have used Netscape Composer with pretty good results. Just don't ask it to do anything too tricky, or it will get confused. Composer comes free with the Netscape browser; it's the little pen on paper icon in the lower right-hand corner of the browser window. So if you have Netscape, Composer might be a good place to start.

Good luck and let us know how things are progressing!
Carole