I write a lot! Have used Wordpress for almost a decade and a half. But, am trying to teach myself other ways of doing it all. It gets confusing for me very quickly. Though, I'm trying to teach myself.
You might try going back to basics. First write some pages in plain HTML using a text editor to get a feel for how tags work. Then add some styling using CSS and play around with that. That’s about all I know how to do, but I’m able to maintain a personal website that meets my needs. Since the site has no dependencies, it will presumably be readable for decades to come. And it is extremely light (not that it gets many visitors!).
Thanks for the advice. I have a bit of html and css experience, but mostly from when I tried to customize WordPress over the years. So, I'm bmhetting better at recognizing what's what in the code (is that code?), but I get really tripped up with the "but where is it?" and "how does it get from my text doc or markdown out there online?"