Designing a simple, static webpage is pretty easy using just 2 tools. Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. With those 2 tools you don't need to know any HTML.
What you do is design/draw what you want the page to look like. Then use the Slice Tool to cut up the 1 big picture into smaller pictures/cells, and save for web. Photoshop will export an HTML file and all the images.
Then go into Dreamweaver, in WYSIWYG view, add/edit your text, set up your hyperlinks, and upload the website to your webserver.
If your interested in trying this, feel free to ask me any questions. I've been using this system of making websites for a long time for my business.
Guy