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At the risk of stirring up the anti-MS crowd, I confess that I use FrontPage. If you want to do anything other than a very simple site, you will welcome the site management features, preview-in-browser, etc. See if you can find an "Academic Edition" (cheaper for "students") at a computer show, or somewhere on line.

Find a reliable host for your site, and be prepared to pay. The "free" hosters want to put their ads on your site. You get what you pay for. When you pay nothing, you don't get much. ISP's generally give you some space you can use for hosting a website. This is fine, but the space you get is very limited, so if you have a lot of visual content, you will find that the site will eventually outgrow this space.

Avoid hosts that require cookies to be enabled (Fortune City). Be aware that some hosts don't allow "hotlinking".

Be sure to read you host's fine print carefully.

Consider coming up with a simple, but meaningful domain name (.com) for your site and register it (about $20 per year). This is a must if you are going to do a commercial site. But, be aware that this will expose your contact information to anyone who wants to see it.

If possible, avoid using such things as banners, animations, popups, and cookies because so many people are blocking them out nowadays. If you must use frames, keep them simple.

Test your site using as many browsers as you can manage, and at various screen resolution settings. Beware of fonts that become unreadable at high resolution. Don't rely on just your own computer for site testing. If you can, try looking at your site on other machines (friends, library, etc.)

Be sure to submit your site to Google, and other search engines. If appropriate, consider joining one or more webrings to promote your site.