I design websites for small businesses. dobsondesign dot com I also highly recommend word press, you can use a free theme and if you want to get more creative, you can make changes to the CSS which you can learn by simple tutorials. Like another poster said you can choose to host on their site which has various limitation, or you can buy your own domain name and pay a webhost up to $20 per month in hosting fees. There are tones out there, I like bluehost, they have a simple installation of wordpress and will walk you through it to get it installed. They also have 1 button bakup which is grat for the newbie, because you will make mistakes as you learn, I highly recommend that if you go this route, take carefull notes of everything that you change in CSS and all the plugins that you install. Plugins are added features, like a calendar, SEO, shopping cart, facebook apps and such that are already designed for you, you just select them, install them and sometimes you have a bit of configuring to do, but most have really good simple instructions.
I just did this site, cookingspotlight dot com and had it up and running in about 2 days, it is a custom design and I have been doing web design for a number of years, but I am self taught. So if you can read and follow simple directions there is a ton of help out there. Remember to look on youtube for tutorials. Good luck!
