HTML is not intended to be a comprehensive page-layout system. Instead, HTML aims to let you describe the structure of your document by indicating headings, emphasis, links to other documents and so forth. The more you work with HTML rather than against it, the happier you'll be.
You can include images and other multimedia objects in your documents, but it should be remembered that not all web users have graphical clients, and many web users voluntarily turn graphics off to save downloading time! If you try to spite such users, you will only lose readers (and customers).
You can in fact specify a great deal about the appearance of your document in the latest web browsers. There is no harm in taking advantage of these features, but as a rule of thumb, always make sure your document looks good in a text-based browser such as Lynx as well as in the graphical browser of your dreams.
This is more than a simple matter of taste. Keep in mind that not all users can see!
There are three ways to produce HTML documents: writing them yourself, which is not a very difficult skill to acquire, using an HTML editor, which assists in doing the above, and converting documents in other formats to HTML. The following three sections cover these possibilities in sequence: