Make a new text file in your favorite wordprocessor.
Get your file to look more or less something like:
| <HTML>
Something really neat. </HTML> |
Now save it. Call it "web1.html" if you can. If you're on an Microsoft machine, you'll need to call it "web1.htm" because you can only use three letter file extensions. The point is just that this extension is critical: without it, a browser won't know your file should be treated as HTML.
Now open the file in your browser, using "file|Open File in Browser" or its equivalent.
You should see a fairly boring web page, unless what you wrote between the two tags was very, very interesting.