First of all, you must decide what kind of website you want to create, because everything starts from that.. If you want to create just a simple blog then use blogger, wordpress blog, blog, weebly or whatever you want..
If you want something a little bit serious (much more serious blog, or website for small business) then you have much more work to do and a lot of learning. I strongly recommend to use free website building platforms like: Joomla or Wordpress..
If you want to build really serious website, for some huge business, where you gonna have a big DB, with customer services, forums running or constantly news updating then I recommend to engage some webdesign company to build requested website. You can use wordpress or joomla as well, but you gonna need some big changes and adjustments to achieve what you want.
And that's it, depending what you want you will need to chose your webhost as well as to chose what kind of SEO campaign you gonna use..
If you want serious then you will need serious resources, if you want small then you will need small and cheap resources..