Okay, in rough order:
1. Decide to pay for hosting. Nope, I didn't say decide if you want free or paid hosting, I said decide to use paid hosting. Freebies are okay for purely personal sites, but remember a freebie site will have ads for *YOUR COMPETITION* and that's no good.
2. Find a domain name and hosting. I recommend GoDaddy -
www.godaddy.com - they're cheap, the founder is a good guy, and I've had no real problems with them. You'll escape under $4 a month for one website (INCLUDING DOMAIN NAME!) if you shop around for coupon codes - Google "godaddy coupon codes". Make sure when you sign up for hosting you choose "linux hosting" and *not* "windows hosting" - this isn't the platform of your computer you use, it's what OS the server your website will be put on is running. Linux has far more cool gadgets available on the server side (things like Joomla!)
3. Decide if you want to use a content management system (CMS) or do static design. CMS makes your website super easy to edit, add content, etc. You can log in to your website from anywhere, no special software required, add and remove content, everything all from a special part of your website. A static design is way easy to create (get something like Dreamweaver and just do it), but takes a lot of work to update and change. I have two static sites -
Comic Expressions - Face Painting in Kalispell, MT and the Flathead Valley of Northwest Montana and
2008 Learn Family Reunion - Home ; and two dynamic sites -
Extreme Randomness - Home and
Mark Uhde - Home . Check them out and you can see how I choose when to use which technique
4. If you're doing a CMS, pick a CMS. I recommend Joomla! - it's free, it's pretty easy, and it's got a HUGE amount of community support, and GoDaddy will install it for you. If you're doing a static design, pick an editor - I recommend Adobe Dreamweaver (part of Adobe Creative Suite). As part of the suite it's like $1899, so a little on the pricey side unless you qualify for discounts (I got it as a student for $360)... but it's THE industry standard. You can make do without Adobe Creative Suite, but it's hard. Designing a website (even one using Joomla since you want to edit the parts that makeup the Joomla site) without Creative Suite is a rather painful process. If you can't afford it though, let me know and I can come up with some free programs that'll give you most of the same functions if not being nearly as fast or easy to use.
5. Build the site
6. Sign up for Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo! Site Explorer to monitor your indexing and where your traffic is coming from.
7. Smile