How to Make a Website (Minus the Headaches)?

If you wish to create you own website without hiring someone, you can use this free software: nvu

or you can buy a software which is more professional, but you will have to diced which one you need for your site ( what's the site's purpose). here's one example: bluevoda.

good luck 

I would not buy any software. I think the best two options are:
1. website templates.
2. WYSIWYG based templates.

Website templates:
these are beautiful designs which come with a ready HTNL page and a typical inner page. You use those pages as the basis of your website and just duplicate the pages to create the different pages  you need. These templates are highly customizable if you know a bit of HTML.
there are excellent templates which are really cheep. to buy. I will not recommend a website to keep this answer spam free, but just Google "website templates".
The price range start from 50$, if you don't mind others using your template design and will reach around 1500$ for a template that will be exclusively yours.

WYSIWYG based templates:
WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get" and this is the ideal solution for you if you don't know any HTML.
Basically WYSIWYG website creators will let you select a template and than edit the page content in a browser based interface. This means you don't need any software or any programming knowledge.
An example for such a service is Google Page Creator but there are others. Some hosting services will provide this option under names such "Instant Website".

Cheers :)

I am working on tryint to put a website together right now.  I bought a couple books on Xhtml and css  cascading style sheets, and I think writing the code is not so confusing if you have that right editor what knocks colors onto the critical aspects of your code so that you can see the ins and outs of your decisions.

Learning all the jargon is hard for me. Every word is a word I know, given a new definition.  But a simple tutor- or the mega expensive content managment systmes, and some are open-source, which I gather means free, and some can be couple G dropped like that, and for managemnt. ugh

goodluck to all, including me! 

I don't know if this helps... Try this link... =)

I am not sure how to make a website on my own, but there is a great website: www.yellow7.com.  This site is very cost efficent for web design. It also give you great strategies on how to optimize your site so that people will see it in the search engines.

I don't think that the right question is asked, therefore all answers are wrong. If you want to build a web site just to tell your friends 'look ma I got my own web site', all of these answers apply. But the first question is 'why do you want to have a web site?'. If you want to reach the masses to promote an idea or sell something. The money that you save building your own website - plus the headaches - is pointless if your web site will not be doing nothing for the next 10 years. It's not simply a question of putting together a web site, but it has to be standards compliant, conform to usability and cross browser issues, it has to be appealing and easy to navigate; the graphics should load fast or else you will lose visitors. After you have taken care of all of those issues, don't be shocked if you're asked to pay vast sums of money so that you can show up on Google results. I'm a freelance designer. That's what I do for a living, so I may be biased. But when I need to fix plumbing problems (minus the headaches) I call the plumber.