Designing a website is very much down to the personal preffrance of the designer.

The steps i take are:

1) Get everything down on paper, use a flow chart for navigation and so on.

2) Because the sites I design envolve alot of code i knock out pesudo first.

3) Knock out the design interface in photoshop.

4) slice all the images i will use.

5) Code all the containing divs.

6) Code layout in css

7) Mock up server side code.

8) Add serverside code to layout.

9) Add content.

I can pretty much guarentee everyone just uses there own steps in creating a website. It's all down to personal preferance.

How step by step do you want/need? do you have any experience with website coding? if you just want a Website you can use something like geocities where they give you templates or googles free web page design which may be deleted at any time since it is in beta.

Step 1:
Find some type of inspiration; an illustration, another website, a movie. Pick some colors you like, and just go to town in Photoshop.

Step 2:
Write out all your HTML, keep it valid, keep it POSH. Create all pages, paragraphs, etc.

Step 3: Polish your design into a nice layout. Copy some text from the HTML page you have started to get a good color scheme going, pick the right type faces, letter spacings, ect.

Step 4: Take your design and try to make your HTML site look like it using CSS and a few images (the less images the better, for loading reasons).

Actually I wrote an article you might find interesting things-to-think-about-before-creating-a-website

Ohh!
Thanks

You can start by browsing some good sites to get an idea of decent layouts and motifs. This goes for the design.

I would also suggest www.w3schools.com they have the best info for almost any Web language.