Agreed, word is a really bad choice for web pages but if you genuinely _have_ to use it and there is no other choice, make sure you take a look at the source code it generates after you've made it and (although you may not have much html experience) just look for things that you think shouldnt be in the source code. Examples would be things like lots of meta information about MS Word and repetative tags which may not need to be there and tons of white space which doesnt need to be there.
Just be inquisitive and possessive of that source code and test it with a few browsers to make sure your users are all seeing the same thing and that Word did not just create code to be viewed using IE. Also, if you're a purist like myself, you could run the html files through the validator at
http://validator.w3.org/ (sfw, naturally). If you use a html editor and take these steps you may find that it leads you to learn some html on-the-job. Thats basically how i started
