I always seem to hesitate when talking to people who are new to the indie web or making their first website because I'm not sure what links to recommend. There's so many resources out there, so if I want to recommend a specific one, which one? Why that one? My instinct is often to send one of the big lists, but those can be overwhelming to me and I've been doing this for a while! I figure they've got to be overwhelming for a new person, too.
So as in all things, I'm making a web page to do the work for me. I'll put a few of my favorite links and resources and what I use them for, and then I'll add links to the giant resource lists for when you're ready to dive into everything.
First of all, though, keep in mind there's different ways to make websites or blogs. I think if you're here, you probably understand the appeal of stepping outside of the walled gardens run by large corporations (or Tumblr). If you just want to blog somewhere and you don't necessarily want to make your layouts by hand or something, that's totally valid and there's actually a lot of sites designed to help with that! I currently use omg.lol's weblog service sometimes, though long-term I'd love to integrate my blog archives and current posts... you know, someday.
For this, my main website, I currently use bestatic as my static site generator. Using an ssg basically just means I don't have to change every file any time I tweak the layout, which is great. They can be a little fussy to learn- I tried several and got frustrated with them before bestatic stuck for me. I don't know why this is the one that works for me, honestly? Lots of people use 11ty or Jekyll or whatever and do way more interesting things, but I like basic.
Since I've been coding for a pretty long time at this point, mostly what I need is not full guides for learning HTML/CSS/etc but instead just a quick reference. My go-to for that is still w3 schools because their site is incredibly searchable and their examples are easy to follow.
If you're completely new and starting from scratch and just want to get the basics down, A Beginner's Guide to HTML and CSS is super easy to follow. HTML for People is an entire book in website format and is probably my favorite all-around recommendation.
The most important thing to know about making websites is that it's really as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. You can learn to make a site that's black text on a white screen and a few links in an hour, maybe less than that. But once you start, you can get as complicated as you want it to be.
If you're interested in not just the mechanics of coding but the whole indieweb experience- deciding on a host, setting up a blog, even the philosophy of the website revival, I'd recommend Your Own Website and MelonKing's Intro to the Web Revival.
Still not sure? Think about why you want to make a site in the first place-- were there other sites that inspired you? You can look around those sites. There may be a colophon or about page that talks about how they built it or what resources they used. You can also hit F12 on your keyboard to view the source code of the website and see how a detail you particularly like was done.
And remember that imperfect-but-published is always better than perfect-but-never-done. Start simple and go from there.