Although my website design has been made entirely by me, (of course, excluding the services provided by the web service provider, I will come to this shortly) I would not recommend you to enter into such a venture, as you see, my site has evolved since a long time and will keep evolving. It didn't take me days, but years in putting all this together (just used to do little by little whenever I found some free time). It will be foolish for a person new to html to do things on his/her own, as it will take a very long time to make everything by yourself. The easier, and smart way is, find a good service provider to do most of the job for you. There are many such service providers you can find on the net, who offer free of cost services.
        Suppose you have all your web pages you want to display on the internet ready, now, how will you publish your website? (i.e., how will your site appear on the internet?). for that, you must either have a web server, or find a web hosting service, i.e., there are many websites you can register with, which provides you of web space, through their servers, i.e., let you host a website by giving you space in their servers, and also, some also provide you with free templates or ready made designs which makes your work much less, saving a lot of time & money. If you can run your own server, there are many software like Apache. You can even turn your own computer into a server if you can keep it on all time and if it is capable of handling the traffic coming its way. I won't get into lot of details, there are already many sites on the net providing them.
        If you know some html, css, java or other scripting languages, and want to design yourself, you can search for sites providing free designs & web contents (like, for example, DynamicDrive), and you can find them all on the net.

         I could not make everything by myself, so I searched for a good service provider & found one! Of course, which provided me great web tools like e-card service, guestbook, blog, daily cartoons, web polls, counters, headline news & much more, for free (there are paid services too, if you want really much more). Also interactive services like e-mail forms, which allowed me to get your feedbacks.
       You too can easily search for a suitable service provider yourself, to siut your needs.