Hi Wilford,
I can relate to your want of free tools to help with getting your blog going. Consider some of the free tools available...
NVU - Open source HTML editor...similar to Dreamweaver
Top-Style Lite - CSS editor
Pixie - Cool little color chooser
OSWD - Open source web designs
W3 Schools - Web tutorials (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc)
Joomla - Content Management System (CMS)
If you are interested in an all-in-one website builder package consider
Site Rubix. Using free tools are great to cut down on start-up costs but the learning curve can be a bit steep at the beginning of building a website or blog. The time you spend learning and the trial and error could be time wasted when you could be making more blog posts and optimize your keywords for the search engines.
I hope this is helpful