Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to users through the World Wide Web (WWW), by way of a web-browser or other web-enabled software like Internet television clients, blogging clients and RSS readers.

Web design is creation of collection of electronic files that are deployed on a web server/servers and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, images (GIFs, JPEGs) and forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.

Typically web pages are classified as static or dynamic.

Static pages don’t change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the page. A simple HTML page is an example of static content.

Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user’s input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.

For ordinary Internet users actually there two way to create a personal web-site – free or cheap Internet resources which offer pre-designed web-pages which requires entering just simple information which configures personal web-site. Here is an example of that kind of service. 
Another approach is more complex and requires purchasing of a domain name (about USD 10 per year) and hosting services (free or about 30 – 100 USD per year) to deploy web-site files on a server. Then you should choose the web-site Content Management System (CMS) which could be also free. For instance for this web-site I use Joomla!

In this section I will try with your involvement to give you some advise and examples on ho to create successful personal web-site.