sangiovesse,
I would not waste time on free sites, if I were you.
I have heard some good things about SiteBuildIt. If you go the template route, remember UNIQUE content is king and search engines can only read plain text, not images, so be sure to incorporate everything you learn about
SEO into the text content of the page. Sites built from scratch some say are best and Microsoft FrontPage is fairly easy for a newbie to learn.
Thank you Garrett for the sweet compliment on PageOne. I try to help whenever I can. :-)