Hi. My site I'm designing is my personal homepage. I just use a few html tags. And I use the first html that was created, not the html5.

I made my index.html file so far, and its even viewable on the web by me only. I have a background image that's a scenery page.

Used the beginning and ending of the div tags to hide my news inside of. I want to know "what is the better way to go in html instead of div tags?".

Div has some great advantages, you can use other languages to point to div's and give them active elements such as CSS and JAVA. Further more div's can give you a naming ability using the class attribute in order to make code more readable or assign other languages to control them. It has a jumble of other uses as seen here and here. Alternatives may try using a table style layout, which has some of the same features, however somewhat outdated it is still fully supported from what I understand. If you are not big on the features, you may try the p tag. You can also eliminate any block style editing if you want to fuse just simple HTML and stick with the font, h1-5, align, and other such tags. I guess the decision would really depend on your end goal and require some learning on the subject.