I suggest that before you even start writing a single piece of HTML code you design the layout and generally how you want your site to look like. Since you're taking Java and Visual Basic classes (to go a bit off topic, learning two languages with two different styles of syntax?), the teacher should teach about good design of your programs.
You can do a mockup of your site design with whatever graphics tools you have available (Photoshop, MS Paint, etc.) on your computer.
After you do those two preliminary steps, open up Notepad (No Microsoft Word: Any HTML that comes out of it will end up looking like garbage) and start coding in HTML. If you don't know HTML and CSS,
http://www.w3schools.com/ is always a good place to start. They've even got tutorials on AJAX, SVG, JavaScript, and Flash.
You can also get a template and start with that. Try and get a template as bare-bones as possible so you can expand on it.
If you plan on making anything dynamic on x10hosting, you will need to learn PHP eventually, although it really isn't that hard to learn.