Ideas are everything, if you can come up with an innovative new website... You can become very popular and insanely rich!
If you have no idea how to code use Microsoft Frontpage (If you have office) If you don't you can search for some free WYSIWYG editors on the web.
If you just want a blog, www.wordpress.org would be the way to go.
Lots of addons and usability on wordpress.

First you need to know what the site is about. What's its purpose: to promote, to inform, to sell, or to communicate? To create a menu or navigation system you'll need to know the site's purpose. If the site is large and/or the content on the site needs frequent updating or is an interactive site, you may need PHP scripting. I'll assume you're designing a simple site.

To design the pages, many web designers start in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, whichever graphics program you like. The Gimp is a good program available for free on download.com. They create a graphical representation of the site template, probably starting with the logo, then the logo inspires the graphical design of the rest of the template. Personally, I find it easier to create the logo and drop it in a div in a wysiwyg editor. I use the editor rather than a graphics program to get the look of the template since I find it easier and ultimately faster. Then I go into code view and manually clean up the coding.

Before you can continue, you'll need to create a navigation system, so you'll need to know what other pages you'll have on your site. To proceed without being clear on page count, you can create a navigation system as a placeholder. You'll need to update it after you've fleshed out your site.

Don't place your site on a permanent host prematurely. It may get indexed by the search engines before it's ready, and the search engines might not like what they see. It doesn't need to be complete, but it should have good content and coding.

Other posters have laid out some ideas on how to proceed in general. I just wanted to address the nuts and bolts reality that for many designers, you have to actually start somewhere, and it will be in a graphics program designing a logo, which will influence the look of the rest of the graphical design.

goto frontpage...u will learn everything automatically

Well, there may be other beter ways, but this is how i would go about doing it.

1. ientify who you are targeting
2. find out how you can help visitors find your site (ie links, ad banners, search engines)
3. identify how many pages, you will need, and build a site map (a list of pages and their content, showing how each page links to another, and makes it easy to navigat)
4. create a CSS stylesheet which will be used on every page (although you may consider a different, plain stylesheet for login pages ect.)
5. Create the graphics that will be used on every page (like the top banner, footer ect.)
6. Create the homepage, using a layout that will be used on all pages (with exeptions like login pages in some cases) but do not add content yet.
7. create a navigation bar, which can be displayed on every page (for easy navigation) (you may want to skip this step if you dont want a navigation bar.
8. create all the other pages, just without the content. (just the title, and a header, as well as anything displayed on all pages ie. logo, and navigation bars)
9. link up the navigation bar (or navigation method) so that all the links work, then test each link.
10. create the graphics for all of the pages.
11. add in the graphics and other content.
12. Now the website is complete, just check it all works, and make sure all of the pictures have an ALT attribute, ect, so it is widely accessible.
13. You now need to find a domain name, make sure you choose the most obvious thing (the first ting a person who didnt know the domain name would guess at, like "yourcompaniesname.com") skip this step if you plan to use a subdomain
14. find a host, make sure you have enough bandwidth, enough space for the site, and any updates which might be added in the future. Make sure it supports all of the languages you have used (like PHP) a make sure that you do not violate their terms of use in any way.
15. Upload your website, and check that everything works, and all of the images apear correctly, ect.

This post has been edited by minimcmonkey: Jun 25 2008, 06:56 PM

The most crucial step in website development is the research and planning you do before you code a page. It's vital that you take the time to determine the purpose and audience of your site before you set it up. Once it's up, things are much more difficult to change. There are many, many resources online where successful website owners go into detail about all the things you'll want to consider. Htmlgoodies.com has a chapter from a book about web site design that you can read for free, and problogger.net has many articles about things to think about (while the site is aimed at blog creation, many of the tips can be applied to any type of website).

Once this is in place, you'll want to focus on how to organize the information you're providing. O'Reilly's book Information Architecture and the Worldwide Web is very, very comprehensive about this step. It's aimed at site providing massive amounts of information, so you won't need to focus on this as much if you're having a smaller site. But it's still important.

The interface and design of your site is the next step. If your site is hard to navigate and use, users won't waste time trying to figure it out. They'll go somewhere else instead. So you need to make all your organized information easy to access through properly presented links, text, images, etc. Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think! is very, very good in this respect. He covers aspects of web usability and ways to test the usability of your site.

The aesthetics is also something to consider. You want an attractive, professional looking site. I find that the best way to acheive this is to look at other site designs and take note of the types of things that look good and they types of things that don't. A popular test for whether something is a good idea is the "would amazon.com do it?" test. Loud music and 3948727634 flashy, bright red animated gifs, for example, would probably be a bad idea.

Once your site is up, you need to think about mainintaining it and promoting it. How often will you (be able to/need to) update it? How can you reach your target audience with news of your site? By posting on forums and commenting on blogs, you can spread the word. Other sites may also want to trade links with you as your site becomes bigger and more well-known. Again, problogger.net has lots of information about these things.

Creating a website is a large process and can be a lot of work, but if you are serious about it and enjoy your topic, it can be a fun experience. Just be sure to give it the time and thought that it deserves, and you will have a successful, well-presented website.

Maybe we should add something here which relates to personal websites....where a newbie may create a website from scratch just for his personal enjoyment or learning.
Will come up with those steps shortly in another topic : Basic Of Website Creation

DON't forget an ABOUT ME page.
It's the one thing that connects your page to
your visitors cos they don't know you at all.

Well i think that when you get a website you should take the following steps:

1. Get the call from a person that wants a web site
   
2. Write down all their information including: Name, Phone. Email if avalaible.
   
3. Then make a note of what they have an idea of, what they want on the site, Business name is there, and a slogan
   
4. Then start a basic design after what they asked for, then call them up and arrange a meeting
   
5. Edit site to what they want again
   
6. then start up a domain name and ftp it up to it
   
7. maintain the site as they request

There is a book out there , you can search for it in google, its called The principles of beautiful web design, its a really good book. it tells u what u need to know to become a good designer. check out the reviews if u dnt believe me

cheers