well playergrant,
I will have to say, it would be mighty hard to explain it all in this little thread, but hopefully I can send you in the right direction. First if you are looking on developing a site I would first suggest identifying what your intended purpose is. Are you looking to make a blog, or a mini-site. If it is an actual multi-page site you are looking to develop, and you're a beginner then learn some html and css. This little bit of knowledge can go A LONG way. Then look for a good WYSIWYG website builder, so that you can make a site without it taking you a lifetime. This program makes the site building experience mostly graphic as opposed to a programming development. With that said, I still believe a basic html course is needed to use most builders to utilize most of the features.
Another route is to use the site builder that comes with most hosting and domain registration sites However it can be costly to get the advanced features like more than five pages. A little steep if you are looking to make even a somewhat prosperous site.
If you are looking to develop a blog (what I think to be the easiest and most affordable route), I would look to some programs like wordpress or blogger. Im not going to say which of these blogs is better, but blogger is definitely easier to set up from the beginning if you have your own domain name. One major plus with the google run program is the free hosting service included.
Both of these programs give you the option to upload free templates to your site and customize it how you please. (This is definitely where the html knowledge helps you a lot.) The process with this knowledge makes your site look a considerable amount of difference in the uniqueness factor of your blog. This is strictly visual and in essence does not help your site become better optimized on major search engine rankings. That is of course unless you count traffic as a contributing factor. Which is up for debate but will not be done so here....moving on.
As far as optimizing your site, I would suggest learning some SEO (search engine optimization.) you can find some great info and tools at sites like SEOmoz.com and SEObook.com. Seomoz even has a beginner guide and checklist for optimizing your site.
Some other great ways to optimize your site are through some social networking sites like twitter, facebook, and myspace. Just go around the web and let people know that your site exists. You can even publish relevant info in other peoples blogs and promote your site after your posts.
I hope this helps
Or you could just pay someone else to do the work. But that would take some cutting of the profits. Your choice. I vote door number 2.