There are many options available and which option depends on your needs? A good place to start is to google for it. Enter keywords like 'create', 'build', 'design' and 'website'. Click the first two pages of the results and you are likely to get a feel of what's available..... but sometimes due to the overwhelming options, we may get more confuse! Read on and you will get a clearer picture.

.... consider to just opt for any of the free blogsites available. The most popular is blogger_com which is owned by Google. Your domain name or web address will be http://myname.blogspot_com. It is a simple process (follow instructions and click) to open and create an account, select a template, start blogging (create content), publish and you are own your way. You can of course place Google Adsense in your blog to earn income. For most individual needs this is good enough.

If you need a blog, but with an address like www.my_name.com (which is more stylish or attractive?) then you need to buy/register for a domain name. Then you need to create/build some web pages on your harddisk (there are many ways to do this), then pay for a web hosting company to host your web pages under your own domain name www.my_name.com (i.e your website). And this is where the options starts to get even more!

Many web hosting companies ask you not to waste time learning html, etc. Just host with them and they provide website builder software with many templates to choose. Just follow simple instructions, point and click, enter your content and publish online immediately. That's it. Usually such chargeout rate for such services depends on:-
(1) number of pages you need
(2) limited to one domain name per one hosted account
(3) MB space you buy
(4) features your request. The more feature, say ecommerce, the more it costs.

The good thing is that the services are designed for the absolute novice and who does not have time nor inclination to learn a bit more about the web. It is easy to get the site up. The disadvantage is that you are 'locked in' with the web hosting company and should you decide to leave later, you cannot take your web pages with you (to another web hosting company). The above applies for small medium companies who want to build a functional website.The company will probably want her own domain name like www.my_company_name.com and need hosting services.

Creating websites with templates is a great start for beginners. You can get these templates provided by web hosts or comes with some other site-building software. The least it does is to give your site a 'decent' look. Imagine if you do not have inclination for design, color schemes, etc, your web page will consist of pure text content and looks like taken out from a text book. But there are sites which do not look 'good' but very popular because they are academic in nature. On the extreme end, there are websites which looks 'good' with changing flash content, images with different looks for different pages. A middle approach however, is practical and sufficient for most needs.

A simple and practical solution would be to consider web hosting with cPanel/Linux feature. Pay monthly for this hosting service which is usually very cheap, consider to use some of the softwares which comes with this cPanel hosting (there are auto-installation scripts) or download some free website builder software and upload to your hosted account and proceed to create a website. If this all sounds scary to you, don't be. It is actually very easy and there's a step-by-step tutorial here to get you through. Of course you must have the inclination to learn a bit about the web. Otherwise just opt for the web hosting with online website builder.

If You Got Money, Pay Others To Build Your Website

'Large' companies' websites include those like Yahoo, New York Times, General Motors, just to name a few. Just go to these sites (google for the names), click through through it and observe their features. These sites have content changing very often (dynamic content), grant access to certain authorised users (user login), retrieve archives, many topics, huge sites with many links, hosting on their own servers. These websites are
customised with probably a team of web masters working at backend. We leave out this kind of 'large'websites for our discussion here.