Well, like I said, I've never just started from scratch with it, but drag and drop an image in, type whatever text you want, etc, and at the top on the toolbar you have buttons for anchors, images, links, tables, and forms. Try reading the help, too, it's actually pretty decent at explaining how to get started. There's even a built-in CSS editor.

It's really easy to figure out once you mess around with it a bit. You have four view options in the editing pane: Normal, HTML Tags, Source, and Preview. Use Normal, that's what you're after. You can select this in the View menu or at the bottom of the pane via tabs.