Advice from a web designer:
Determine what kind of website you want to create. gius has given as example one type: a content-heavy site presented in a blog format. Other examples are thesartorialist.com, popsci.com and wired.com. If this is the kind you want, I suggest you head on over to blogger.com or wordpress.org and create an account. To give your blog site a distinct look, you need to study CSS (or cascading style sheets). You don't need to know everything—just devote a good deal of time (and patience) modifying your blog's appearance: Change the banner image; change the colors of the text, links, background, etc; and you should be good to go. Be sure to update often so people will have something to look forward to!
Another type of website is the informational website. Majority of the sites available in the 'net fall in this category. Sites like these require that you have a fundamental understanding of how a website is run: the index page, where the links go and how they behave, etc. Adobe's Dreamweaver program is my personal favorite in building websites because of its intuitive interface and powerful tools. You can also use iWeb--much, much easier to learn compared to Dreamweaver--if you have a Macintosh computer.
Still overwhelmed with the things you need to learn? Go out and buy a "Web Design for Dummies" book. It's an awesome source of information.
