This one's easy. Just save any code you write in "low level" text editors such as notepad and probably even the higher ones like Microsoft Works/Word as .html files, and in quotes. So if you want to save the page as index.html, in the Save As... window you'd type in "index.html" exactly - quotes and all. Once you've done that, however, you can use the normal save feature. But if you ever use the Save As... feature again, though, you still have to enter it in quotes.
Once you've done that, you can either click on the html file and open the page that way (completely viewable offline, unless you specify some picture or file who's URL points to an online location) or do it the hard way by opening your web browser, selecting the File -> Open option and opening it from there. And that's it. You see your web page in it's entirity and make changes that are reflected immediately. In Internet Explorer, the default hotkey for the refresh button is F5, so you can see changes even faster if you have it.
Since that is so easy, I'm going to give you some web page debugging information. Hands down the most common problem encountered in HTML is a table that doesn't look like you wanted it to look. And in tables, a fairly common error is that there are too many/too few table cells (td tags) on one or more rows. This is often due to rowspan confusion. When rowspan is used, you don't have to place a table cell tag in the place of the one that was eaten up by rowspan. Say you have this table:
| R1C1 | R1C2 |
| R2C2 |
You might get careless and place a second td tag in the second row, but it isn't necessary, as the rowspan accounted for it. It is the same deal when working with a rowspan and colspan in the same cell. The rowspan modifier eats up colspan number of cells on each row that is affected by the rowspan trait. Confusing? Take this table...
| R1C1 | R1C2 | R1C3 | |
| R2C1 | R2C2 | ||
| R3C1 | R3C2 | R3C3 | R3C4 |
The second cell in the first row has rowspan=2 and colspan=2 applied to it, and it has another cell after that one. So that means only two cells will be required on the next row - the first and last. The center two are eaten by the rowspan/colspan properties. The RxCx are the row and column number as I typed them in. That R2C2 is in the 4th column, but it is the second cell I typed into that row. Get it? Oh yeah, the third row returns to normal, as the rowspan was only 2.
Other problems are missing tags or quotes. If you find that code has been displayed on the page, then it's probably a missing opening tag. For example, here's a table tag with the < sign missing: table cellpadding=3 cellspacing=14 border=3>
Oh, and in my HTML tutorials, I show you code on the page using special characters that generate the < and > signs. The one above is a real > sign, and had the < sign been there the whole thing would disappear - this is the actual error in action. Anyways, to fix this problem, simply use the "find" command of your text editor and type in exactly what you see - in this example, "table cellpadding=3 cellspacing=14 border=3>". It'll take you straight to the problem and you can correct it.
Missing text is usually the result of a missing closing tag. To fix the problem, just find the spot where the text you entered ceased to be there!
To see the error in action, view source on the page (View -> View Source) and use the find command to find the text "name=notag" - without the quotes. You'll see some text that doesn't appear on the page due to a p tag with no > sign on it.
Missing closing quotes can cause any number of problems. For example, in making this article I generated the missing quote error at the end of the article, and the only problem that occured was that you could see the tag that contained the missing quote. However, when I put text after it, it disappeared off the screen and turned the text that followed purple (the tag I used was <font color="blue>).
The same goes for just about every error in HTML. Since the page is generated no matter what mistakes you make, there's no telling how it'll handle any given problem. The above problems and solutions will more than likely cure what ails yah. But if it doesn't, there isn't much choice except to check everything line by line. I hope this article has instilled knowledge into you that will be helpful in your HTMLing career!