The simple answer to this is no you don’t need to know HTML to make money online but there is a rather large caveat or two.

If you don’t know HTML, at least a little, you will have to hire someone to do everything you want to do online. This means you have to have:

1. Money – at least enough to payout to get every thing done until you start making money.
2. A Techie – this has to be someone that understands HTML and website creation that you can contact at any time to change or create something for you.
3. Some one that knows enough about HTML and the internet to tell you if you are being ripped off by the techie above.

You should be #3 above. If you know at least the basics then you will be able to tell if you are being ripped off by the “techie”

It also helps if you know a little about it so that you can tell the techie what you want in a way that THEY will understand it.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert at HTML, PHP or CSS but you should know enough about it to know if the information you have is enough for the person to create a website and again I will come back to the MONEY issue.

For example you want all the links on your site to have the same look and feel. For this reference we will say that you have a 5 page site that the techie created for you and about 20 links on it.

You tell the techie that you want all the links to be blue and when you put the mouse over them you want a yellow background to appear.

The techie thinks about this for a second and says, “We will have to create a cascading style sheet and create a class for the links to do this. Then we will have to go in and manually update all the links on each page individually. I can probably do this for you for about $150.00.”

Is this a good price???

If you don’t know then what is a good price?

$250

$350

$50

To me for this type of work it should only take them about ½ an hour and $50 is more then adequate. You could probably find someone on RentACoder that would do it for less then that.

If you have an unlimited supply of money and you don’t mind getting ripped off then don’t worry about knowing any of the mechanics behind a website. But if you are like a majority of the people out there that is just starting out and don’t have the money to pay some one to do the work then I suggest you learn at least the basics.

Remember there are only two things you can use as leverage to get your business going they are time and money. Which ever you have the most of is what you will need to spend.

And now for a shameless plug. I have a site called Marketing Beginners that will gie you all the basics of HTML and some CSS and some PHP and it is free. You can sign up just by clicking anywhere on the site where you see the words Marketing Beginners in blue. Or use the link to the right under My Sites.