http://htmldog.com/ is great just to make sure you know all the basics and it has very nice reference lists:
http://htmldog.com/reference/cssproperties/
http://htmldog.com/reference/htmltags/
Another good beginner site is http://www.csszengarden.com/ but they pretty much just show off examples of how drastically you can change the look of a site with different css.
http://css-tricks.com/ is the best learning site. By far. It has a wide variety of topics for a huge range of skill levels. So starting here: http://css-tricks.com/category/beginner/ is a must. The archives are huge, but the search feature is very good.
If you feel like reading a lot, http://www.alistapart.com/ has a lot of articles that are written out in a long formal way, so it's a lot more conceptual than the other sites I linked to.
And finally, here's one of my first sites that I made for my dad: http://celadonjon.com/ I typed every character myself, and it's far more simple than just about any website you'll ever see. If you can figure out how everything works on that site then you've got a good handle on the basic concepts of HTML and CSS.
NOTE: you will need to know a basic amount about how text files stored on a server are written and accessed. HINT: http://filezilla-project.org/
my gmail is just royler