Basic skills

It seemed to me that the technical skills I would require to start off with would be fairly small:

The best tip I can provide here for someone who's on a budget is to use whatever free hosting you can get from your ISP to play around with HTML (and javascript and CSS - cascading style sheets etc) before spending anything on hosting.

I've provided one link above to a page with some good basic stuff but keep searching.

Within a short period of time I'd already written some pretty fundamental and fancy html (or so I thought) using any number of online tutorials as help (as above). I actually found that an idiot's guide book (you remember, those things you leave open beside your monitor as you beaver away) was ulitimately the most useful tool for this part of the learning. Idiot's guides (good ones) often provide suggestions about other paths you may wish to follow (eg. Javascript)

If you're using free hosting you'll only need something simple to load the pages up with (ftp planet as mentioned above - free), but you may also eventually want to load pages up to your site using a secure connection. This will depend on you hosting company supporting this (and this is perhaps one of the things you may want to investigate before you start paying for hosting - do they support SSH?). If they do you'll also need a more robust secure ftp client (WINSCP also free).