Congratulations on wanting to start your own website. There are a couple of things to keep in mind before you begin.

1. The easiest way to get an online presence is with a blog. the top 2 blog providers are www.blogspot.com and www.wordpress.com. There is a fair amount of learning that you have to take but it is by far the quickest and easiest way to start off.
2. If you want a traditional website you can use free WSYIWYG (What you see is what you get) technology like NVU (www.nvu.com) which is open source software. It is capable of building a fairly good website depending on your skill level. However you do need to get basic HTML training which is freely available on the internet. Just do a search for free HTML training or tutorials and you should find quite a few sites that can help your cause. Getting yourself a good website template will help you tremendously as all you really have to do is add the content that you want to the template.
3. The other option you have for a low cost website is to use the services of freewebs or google sites. You can join freewebs at www.freewebs.com. You will get templates that you can use and they update their technology regularly. google sites is new and requires you to sign uo fr a google account first. You an sign up at www.igoogle.com

For most of these options you should remember that even though they may be free it does require that you do learn some basic programming skills first before you are able to put out a decently functioning basic website.

If you would like some free tools to help your journey along then visit my squidoo site at http://www.squidoo.com/internetmarketingfreesoftware

I hope you find this helpful.