build a website yourself

These are the high-level steps to design, populate and push you site live.

1. Decide on your website name, register your domain and select a web hosting company.
2. Learn basic HTML and/or select an HTML template design to modify with your content.
3. Select an HTML editor to edit the HTML pages. I have used FrontPage, Homesite and finally Adobe/Macromedia's Dreamweaver. I recommend Dreamweaver - It's the best I've ever used. It is very user-friendly and graphically valid. [Note: If you cannot afford Dreamweaver, try out Kompozer.net for an openSource (aka FREE) program that can get you started.]
4. Select an image program to edit your images, icons and add text to your images. Adobe Photoshop seems to be one of the best out there. Adobe/Macromedia Fireworks is also a great image program to use with Dreamweaver. Fireworks is what I use to create graphics and optimize photos for the web. Fireworks came as part of my Dreamweaver application. (Note: go to Gimp.org for a free version with fewer bells and whistles and a higher learning curve)
5. Do the training on the tools you've selected. You will get frustrated very quickly if you don't spend the time learning the tools before you start on your site.
6. VERY IMPORTANT!! Save a copy of your website files in a special place so when you make a mistake on your files (and you will), you can pull the original file from its special place and make everything all better.
7. When you've updated the website HTML files with your images and content, upload your files to your hosting provider. You can also sign up for email through web hosting provider and have a really nifty yourname@yourbusiness.com email address.
8. Test your site --- fix your site -- test your site --- fix your site
   1. If possible, test your site on a Windows PC and a MAC
   2. Test your site using several different browsers (IE, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome)
9. Maintain your site. Update your content as needed.
10. Submit your sitemap to the top search engines.
11. Use web tracking tools that tell you how many visitors are getting to your site, what pages they are viewing,where you rank with the search engines, how your keywords are scoring.
12. Make your website more accessible to web crawling engines, like google so your website is high on the results list.
13. Monitor and tweak your SEO (search engine optimization) results to increase your rankings.
14. Content also greatly increases your ranking. Keep writing content that applies to the theme or area of expertise of your site.