Hi. I'm the webmaster for a small business and we want to get on the web. I know very basic HTML from screwing around on Geocities, Angelfire, etc. back in the day, but I gather it is necessary/recommended to get some editing software. What would you recommend?

I'm looking to set-up a pretty basic page. We only have one product we're selling, so we'll only need a few pages other than the home page at most. I don't know if this is a totally out dated design, but I was thinking of having a banner at the top of the page and clickable images as links on the left side then the actual content in the center...hopefully that makes sense.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

but I gather it is necessary/recommended to get some editing software. What would you recommend?

Not really, you can do it ALL in a text editor such as Notepad.

Since you're brand new, I would suggest you get started the right way:
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html1/

^^ Thats a good reccomendation, however if you want to be doing something in the meantime (or don't want to shell out ) then I would reccomend learning the basics of HTML and CSS at W3Schools.com

I agree with Angelosanto W3Schools is a great website

There are other ways to go. You can always subscribe to a website builder - you'll get a nice look anf functionality. Website Tonight would be good for you.

It all depends on what you want. Yap you can do almost anything with notepad, but if you are not familiar with html, you can always get those sitebuilder that some hosting company bundle in with thier plans.

Personally I like RVSiteBuilder. But coding your own site is still much more fun. Trial and error If you need an editor I suggest kompozer which is a fix for nvu. If you going to code it, I suggest PSPad since you can edit perl scripts without destroying it on top of html / php and other format plus it has an in built placeholder text generator, a a handy tool for designer