Have you checked out freewebs? (
www.freewebs.com)
You may or may not want to use that as your permanent site, but you can sign up and make a totally free website and start getting an idea of what's going on. Another cool thing about freewebs is you can charge for things using paypal, so no big expense for the merchant account.
I have one free site there, a few paid sites (paid gets rid of ads); my largest business site is on another host which I'm not completely fond of, so I'm not going to recommend them (they're just too high tech for most of us at that host). I have some unused domains parked at a cool place, where I can stick some google adsense ads and keep all of that money--that's not a terribly bad idea for your domain name while you're playing with the freewebs one.