Directnic offers domain registratin for $15 per year per domain, and it includes their free hosting, but they place their own banner ads at the top and bottom of your pages. For an additional $15 per year (toal cost $30 per year per domain) you can convert your doman to bannerless hosting, with bandwidth for downloads of $2 GB. If you have more than one domain or if you want to eliminate the banner ads, 1 and 1 Internet will likely be the better choice. Their Linux hosting packages (the one I suggest) start at $2.99 per month (essentially $36 per year) and include one domain. If you want a site without the Directnic advertising banners, this is only $6 more per yet and you get better email options, and 250 GB of traffic per month. You can also add additional domains to any of the 1and1 packages for $5.99 per year and your hosting and bandwidth allocations are shared across your domains. For $4.99 per month (vs. $2.99) you can get their next level of hosting, which includes two domains, more traffic, and more features for creating your web site. My 28 domains are hosted with their $9.99 per month package, which includes even more bandwidth, and many more web site management features.
If you want to avoid paying for hosting, you should check to see if a a hosting service may already be provided by your internet service provider (e.g. America Online, Earthlink, MSN, etc) as part of your service. If you prefer not to use your ISP for hosting, you can also use one of many free or low cost hosting services like Geocities (part of Yahoo!). There are a lot of other companies providing this kind of service. Such web hosting providers will allow you to host your site, but they may add advertising content, so that whenver someone visits a page on your web site, they see advertising added to you pages by the web hosting provider. These services will also allow you to host your site without advertising, but they charge you for this option, often more than directnic or 1and1 options I described earlier.
My advice is that if you are just starting out, read the documentation provided by your ISP to see if they offer space to host your web site, and if so, start out there. If your site is small and only has a small number of users, this option may allow you to host your site without added advertising, and without paying anything more than you already pay to connect to the Internet.
If your needs are real simple, you can create the site yourself using HTML, HyperText Markup Language, the language for describing web pages. You can also use a web page editor like Microsoft FrontPage. (part of some versions of Microsoft office). If you don't have FrontPage or another HTML editor, or for some other reason choose to write the HTML code for your site by hand, you can find many guides on the web to learn how to write HTML. If you can tolerate lots of pop up ads and distracting banners, one such guide can be found here.
If creating the site yourself you will create the pages on your own machine and upload them to the server following instructions provided by the hosting service, or you might write the pages through a web interface provided by the service. Almost all hosting service provide guides to help you create and upload content to your site.