your best bet is probably to use a program like dreamweaver or frontpage. a HTML editor that allows you edit the page as if it was a word document, but make sure you dont use something like Word (as wordprocessers/etc that have settings to save as a HTML file generate endless crap code where as specilised HTML editors produce a cleaner more efficent HTML code)

as your writting the page, every now and then pop into the HTML code window to view the background workings of the page and i'm sure you'll quickly pick up what does what in no time. (most of it is obviously, plus messagebaords tend to use a very simular coding system for people to format their submissions)

the sad thing is, in reality you dont need to know HTML to write HTML pages