It's very rewarding to create your own website and way cheaper than paying someone else to do it for you. I designed my own snake site (click on my banner to check it out) after reading a book that I will recommend to you. It's called 'The Non-Designer's Web Book' by Robin Williams & John Tollett. It gives you all the basics you need for getting started on designing a website. As far as software goes, I hear a lot of people like Dreamweaver. I am hoping to take a Dreamweaver class in the near future but have not worked with it so far. I designed my site with Web Easy, which cost less than $100 and is very easy to work with. I haven't worked with anything else yet to compare it with, though. Good luck!