To build a website from scratch you don't need to have any special knowledge or education.
You can simply go ahead start learning.

Tooling wise you don't need much, a text editor and a web browser.

There are a few components that make up a website. HTML which stands for Hypertext markup language and CSS, Cascading style sheet.

Think of HTML as the blueprint for your website. You define the page structure.

Using CSS you can style the HTML element to define the look and feel, like color fonts etc..

To get a simple website up and running you need a lot of tools, a text editor, and a browser is your friend.
The code is simply some text so you can edit it in any text editor. The reason we use a special text editor like vs code is that we can code faster with it.
It provides syntax coloring and autocomplete.