I think the first thing to realize is that you must be patient, willing to learn and careful with your money. If you have a lot of money you can dis-regard this advice but I don't think you would be reading this at all if you did, you would just pay someone to spend your money for you. If all you want to do is to have a small site with photos and stuff for friends you might start with yahoo or youtube or even ebay if you are only interested in selling a few items form your home. Many, many places have websites ready made, or "templates" they are called where you can just input your information and away you go. You pay a nominal fee monthly for the right to use their site, (hosting it is called) but it is very simple and easy to do and a good way to start. It is not the most economical but at this point you may want to go that route.

If you are a bit more interested in doing things yourself, have a bit of technical ability and are willing to learn, the best way in the long run is to buy a software application to build your own sites form your own computer. You do it all in the comfort of your computer chair and then "upload" the information to a "server" and you are on the web! Now it costs $200-$500 or so for something decent, but the cost is going down all the time and there are even free versions available also. Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft Forntpage. NVU and XsitePro are all designed to help you in this regard. These are solely created to help individuals in designing professional websites.

If you are really ambitious and technically unafraid you can learn about "HTML" or the language computers use to function and you can build your own sites with letters and numbers as things were down before the advent of user-friendly computer software designed for the purpose of web building.

No matter which way you decide to go, take your time, be patient and persistent and you will be making your own websites in no time!