I run my own website, and first made all my pages with NVU (you can download it for free, and it has a wysiwyg editor (easy lol) but it does help if you know a bit of HTML. If you google, you can find online guides to learn HTML.
I have pacwebhosting.com for my webhost. I think it's brilliant. £2.99 (about $5) a month for the domain, webspace, and hundreds of extra things, like blogs, forums etc.
Let me know if you need any help.x