You don't need any fancy tools. You can write decent HTML using nothing more than your notepad or wordpad program. It's very simple, and you don't need to know any fancy tricks.
If you are submitting to Elfwood, we don't want to see lots of different colours, fancy fonts or odd sizes of text. The simpler to read the better :)
I'm not an expert, if you want some REALLY good help I can't say enough about HTML Goodies If you want to know all about HTML and the cool things you can do with it, go there.
Meanwhile, here are some steps to writing a simple, no frills document:
1. Open notepad or wordpad, and at the top of your page, you need this tag to signify the beginning of the document:
<html>
2. The next tag you put signifies the beginning of your content:
<body>
3. Then you put in your actual story or poem.
4. For a single line break (puts next line straight underneath), use the following tag:
<br>
5. For a double line break (leaves one blank line), use this one:
<p>
6. When you get to the end of your text, you need to signify the end of your content:
</body>
7. And then you need to signal the end of the document:
</html>
8. When you save the document, select "all file types" and put .html at the end of the file name.
9. Double click on the document to see what it looks like in your internet browser, that is how it will look if uploaded to the internet.
If you want to put a bit of formatting in, here are some tags that might come in handy. It's really important to have the / symbol in the tag at the end, if you don't 'close' the tag it will format all the rest of the text on the page the same way.
just change the text between the tags:
<b>bold text</b>
<i>italic text</i>
<u>underlined text</u>