Here is a brief summary of my Webexperience, First things first, use Firefox a free, open-source web browser for
Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The easiest way to have an online presence is to build your own blog with Blogger. You can also build and maintain website with the help of cms like drupal and WordPress. Then all you need is a Good Domain Name. If you want a html-ftp blog cms Thingamablog is the perfect answer.
For people who would not like to work with code, a tool like Zoundry can be set up for easy update to the CMS or
Blog. You can also look at Snapfiles, where you can choose and download many productivity freeware.
My DIY Kit for webpage building has been Mozilla Composer and FileZilla for Quite some time. Then for templates and themes i use Top Style Lite and the indispensable CPick. All my pages are generated using ReplaceEm.
Dynamic Drive has DHTML scripts to make your pages more lively, thefreecountry.com has valuable Programmers Resources, many scripts can be found at Hotscripts that enable you to make database based, multi-user
applications for developing your own online service. Search for developer or design resources in software using Cyber Chimp Search or look thru the WebLinks Section.
Freeware and Productivity Tools -
IrfanView does Most graphics optimization and conversion for the webmaster or coder. XnView is useful for many graphic manipulation needs.

Open Source vector graphics editor using Scalable Vector Graphics, SVG. file format Inkscape is a tool for Artists. Photofiltre is a nice drawing software, which is easy to use.
This is what you will need to produce PDF files on a budget. With Ghostgum Software. 
TextPad is a powerful, general purpose editor for plain text files. Easy to use, with all the features a power user requires. NoteTab Light is the ultimate free Notepad replacement.
Webmaster and WebDesign -
Webbunny Tutor - For Newbie Webmasters - Learning html, css, java script with bunny rabbit. Start with this to learn javascript Bookmarklets are fun and Learn some basics .
Mouse over one button. - Mouse over effect. Mouse over two buttons - Mouse over used for many buttons.
Frames Midi Tutorial Example - The sound in the browser, the best part. Midi Jukebox Example - An online music machine, a 'dhtml' midi player. Graphics in Webpages Png, Gif and Jpeg - Merits and Demerits of Images.
Free Tools and Tutorials - Some Links which assisted me in learning. Internet Country Codes. - The domain codes for every country.
Google Help - The Most important, How to get the Page you want. To build dynamic applications, Learn LAMP Linux-Apache-Mysql-Php for web applications.
More examples of DHTML, CSS and JS i tried DHTML Page Effects Examples, A way to make Spider proof pages,
Some CSS templates and Style Ideas.
Want to acquire knowledge, read online at Wikibooks and Gutenberg.
Lastly you can monitor Live, the health of the web by looking at the Internet Traffic Report graph on the right.