It all starts with good html/xhtml coding. You can find great free website templates, to start with, at www.oswd.org.
Yes you can pay lots of money to professional website design companies, but you can also edit your website for free, by yourself. The popular graphical website editing program NVU is fully capable of customizing any template to your liking.
Overall why pay money right away, when you can give a graphical editing program a chance. You may find it easier than you think 
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A great way to start learning about html/xhtml, and websites in general, is via templates. OSWD.org hosts user submitted website templates, that are inherently free of charge, with modification being encouraged. Get your hands dirty, open that index.html file and take a peek around, and tear some code apart to see what it does
CMS (Content Management Systems) are also interesting, and can indeed make a very successful website. Open Source CMS provides a rather extensive list of popular software titles. Ohh and the best part, most likely any software you pick will be completely free to use.
Ohh, and always remember, if you do indeed begin the path of learning html/xhtml coding, do take note of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) concepts:
http://www.bgevolution.com/blog/index.php/seo-search-engine-optimization/
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