What to do to make a website, starting an online business, what website design software do you use?

It pays to get a quick overview about what you need to know to make a website. It will make more sense if you understand the important parts of designing a website and hosting a website. Go here for general web information.
Webpages are mainly written in HTML code for content, with CSS which tells the browser how the style of the page should be formatted, such a font type, size or colour.

Client-side? Server-side?

So why am I waffling on about client-side and server-side? You can buy or get free open-source templates of ASP or PHP code that can save you heaps of time. It will give you a site that is alive, instead of just an online phamphlet like what you get with pure client-side webs.

A PHP site connected to a MySql database can give you a site where people can register for newsletters, participate in forums, go into members-only areas and make comments on pages. You can go via an admin page and update your content in a full-feature editor with all the bells and whistles, you can upload/download/edit delete content and pictures. You can check your daily visitors, where they came from and when they looked at you.

See Sitex, where you can download this type of website for free. I recommend that your Host runs a Linux operating system, as I had problems with this code on a Windows server. ASP and MS Sql is more suited to a Windows server.

Another option is SiteSell with it's Site BuildIt! tools.

With JavaScript for client-side or server-side action which means the code runs on your computer in your Browser. Examples of JavaScript is those buttons on web page navigation menus that light up when you move your mouse over it.
With PHP and ASP for server-side action, which means the code runs on your Web Host's computer. So when you click on a button on your page, it sends instructions to the Host to do something serious. Example is a feedback form, someone types in their feedback, click the submit button and the code on the Server writes and send an email to you and sends a Thank You page to the person and maybe put the information of the person sending the feedback into a database.

With FLASH movies so music and movement can be incorporated into the page, and with other code and other objects to enable all the wonderful things a webpage can do nowadays.

Sure you can make a website page yourself. If you can use MS WORD, you can design a web page. Just save the document in Word as a HTML document. HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language and is code that the Browser reads and understands and use to present the webpage to you.
WORD writes a lot of extra formatting code into your webpage, just so you can convert it back to Word from HTML later if you need to. This formatting code makes for overloaded HTML, so I don't recommend using WORD to make web pages.

Or you can write pure HTML code, try it here. Go on, nobody is watching! Your first webpage in HTML

You can use MS Frontpage, or Mozilla KompoZer (free), or Adobe Dreamweaver, and many other WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, where you work in a text editor with all the buttons to do web things easy and quick, and the program write the HTML code in the background for you.

I recommend W3 Schools or HTML Help to learn HTML and CSS. I learned my HTML there and have since trained many people in Corporate Training Centres and Colleges to use it. It helps so much with website webpage design.

Click here for HTML Help and here for W3 Schools

Then there is FLASH. I've written whole sites in FLASH. You could make a website which is quite impressive. I did not know it then, but all the search engine robots saw when they land on an all-Flash site was a black box and meta tags, no content they can read and pick up keywords for their database. So there you are, the the best looking website in town stuck away in a deserted street. FLASH can be very effective, I still use it, but only as an add-on to content on a page. This is an example where I use FLASH as a sales brochure. You can use these sales brochures as an email attachment, or your prospective customers can download it onto their hard drives, and look at it in their own time when they are offline. Why not give them a choice? Like "read my site online or download this FLASH file and read it off-line"!
Contact me if you want something done in FLASH.

SBI!'s Buildit make it easy and quick for new web builders and experienced web builders to make a website and you get the tools for easy and quick design, complete with extended help and advice, page templates and monetizing add-ons.
You don't need to learn all that code and techo stuff, SBI! give you easy-to-use tools to do the job yourself.