I'm going to assume that you want your own complete website with its own hosting and its own domain name. This gives you the most control over your site and once you get the hang of it, isn't much harder than using one of the many services out there that let people design simple one page websites on communal web space.

1. Get a domain name

Deciding on a domain name that's going to be relevant to your website is one of the first things you need to do. You'll probably need to search a bit - it's unlikely that you'll be able to buy a dot com domain with just one word in it nowadays. But two or three words, maybe separated by a hyphen, are pretty easy. Then you'll need to register the domain with a service such as NameCheap.

2. Get some hosting space

Although your regular email account may come with some hosting space, it's better to rent space on a commercial server. Hosting is available from as little as a dollar a month but it pays to spend a bit more to get a reliable host who'll give you support when you need it.

3. Point your domain at your web space

This is a simple matter of copying and pasting a couple settings that your hosting people will give you into your domain name control panel. The reason for doing this is it gives you more flexibility than buying your domain name through your web host. If the worst happens and your host disappears or gives you super-bad service, you can simply point your domain at a new host and carry on with very little disruption. If you want to do a web based shop, check that your host allows you to build your online shop easily - most will have an ecommerce package or the option of easily installing a shop script.

4. Design your website

This needn't be as daunting as it first sounds. I tend to use Wordpress, which is usually available as a one click install, for most of my website designs nowadays. You can add new pages at the click of a button and there are thousands of different designs and a myriad of extras that will help your site stand out from the crowd. If you need to get more complicated, software like Front Page lets you design web sites in a very similar way to using a word processor. Unless you think you're going to be the next Amazon, in which case you'll need a team of skilled programmers, that's probably all you'll need.

5. Start writing

You've now got the skeleton of a website. All you need to do is to breathe some life into it by writing words, uploading photographs and embedding the occasional YouTube video if you want to brighten things up a bit.