If you try to build a website using your knowledge of HTML alone, you’ll end up with a website that looks like it was built in 1998… Remember what the web looked like back then? I do.

Then again, you can’t really get to know CSS or AJAX or any of that other fancy stuff (and I’m not even talking websites that employee databases either) without having intimate knowledge of HTML first. HTML is the web’s alphabet. You can’t do much if you only know the alphabet, but if you don’t know the alphabet your illiterate.

It takes a LOT of knowledge to build a decent website. Why spend months, even years, learning all of that, when you can pay some Indian company $300 to build it for you in a couple of weeks? That’s what everyone does nowadays. Just make sure you give them really specific requirements and not allow them to use their own “creativity”...

EDIT: If there are courses focused on building Web CONTENT, not Web Code, or that talk about e-commerce, or online advertising that would far, far more useful to you than learning how to write code.