How Do I start/design/implement a website for myself?

Squarespace all the way. There are cheaper alternatives, sure, but they require vigilant maintenance and patching if you don't want malware injected into your site through the exploit du jour. And Wordpress doesn't respect line breaks, which infuriates me.

Yeah, I've had a Wordpress for a long time but now that I've tried Squarespace, I think it's worth it. The designs are better and more contemporary (any decent Wordpress theme is paid anyway) and the editing is dead easy. If you don't feel like hand coding stuff and figuring out your own hosting, it's great. I know I could stay with Wordpress but it's a little more baroque and honestly, a few bucks a month is not a bad deal considering how much easier Squarespace is.

Seconding Squarespace. The $8/month is billed annually, but that also comes with one domain name registration. There are enough options with templates and customization that it won't feel too cookie-cutter. If you want a cheaper, simpler solution, you can register a domain name and point it at Tumblr.

It seems to me that Squarespace is the 2015 version of this.

Seconding Wordpress.com Its a great way to start and the basic level is free. They can hep with domain registration for a small yearly fee, but it's not mandatory to have a domain with them when you sign up. You can always try it out and add a domain later.

I would not advise you to pay nearly $100/year for hosting a webpage. Setting up wordpress on a site such as dreamhost is really easy and a domain name is just $12 a year. And if you look around you can find much cheaper webhosts as well. I use stablehost. One click setup.

Another vote for squarespace.

I used Weebly and it was basically like building with Legos. They make all the various shapes and all I had to do was stick together the pieces I wanted. And I got my domain through them.

https://sites.google.com/site/sites/ if by "do it himself" is code for "set it up himself" and not "code HTML/CSS/etc from scratch himself". Google Sites are free, fairly trivial to set up, and don't require him to maintain the backend so he can proceed directly to the "put in content" stage. They provide step-by-step instructions for setting up a site to use a domain name for many major registrars. Also putting in a plug for https://www.namecheap.com/ as a registrar, which I starting using because of past AskMe recommendations.