It kind of depends on your ability to pick it up. The basic concepts are not hard at all. The hard part is learning how all the different browsers will react with there little quirks. I'd say go through the tutorials on w3schools for HTML and CSS and you'll have a pretty good idea of what you are doing in a week or two.

Everyone has there own methods. But having the basic page template is handy. (I've been using the ESWAT "framework" lately to have all the necessary tags already in the file. http://eswat.ca/ ...i don't know why he took down the description etc.) And there are plenty of templates available online for various types of layouts. I, however, usually code my layouts from scratch. ...Usually using w3schools as a reference for when I can quite remember how some HTML or CSS works.