Figuring out content

Start Simply

The Yale Web Style Guide

How to sites and tutorials

Project Cool at www.projectcool.com

Webmoneky at www.webmonky.com

HTML Guides and cheat-sheets

Barebones

Print it out and keep it near you!

WebMonkey's HTML Cheat sheet
ISO entities (stuff like copyright symbols...)

Cool tools

html editors

Free HTMLPad
Cheap HomeSite Pricey, but amazing Dreamweaver

Image creation/manipulation

Photoshop the cadilliac of image creation and manipulation programs. Kill, murder, maim, beg, borow, steal, but get this puppy.

Paintshop Pro If you can't bring yourself to do the above to get photoshop, try this fine litle program. It doesn't have the range of photoshop, but if you mostly want to resize image, and do a little altering of them, it is fine.

Fireworks, ImageReady Weboriented versions of photoshop, with more functionality than paintshop pro, an amzingly reasonable pricetag, and great optimazion features. These two kids are probably the way to go if you think you will be creating only for the web and not for print. Fireworks is considered the slightly better program for webneeds, but if you are familiar with photoshop's interface, fireworks has a lower learnign curve.

Dicer For chopping up large images for better load experience, and for creating mouseover effects. http://www.ziplink.net/~shoestring/dicer01.htm or you can download it here, it's Freeware http://www.winsite.com/info/pc/win3/winsock/dicer039.zip/downl.html

Color

http://www.intermania.com/htmlpad/index.html

webclut
The webclut allows you to choose colors in the 216 browser palette to use for bgcolor, link, text colors
http://www.lynda.com/hex.html

Named color table
http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/htmlguid/colortab.htm

Building a good looking page

Sucky to Savvy
Web Pages That Suck
cooltype Many great tricks and tips
PhotoShop reference So many links for your PhotoShop needs

And a Page that really works for your audience

useit.com

Link Heaven

Web Page Design for Designers

Figuring out mac users have on their system (useful for writing complex font tags that work cross browser)