One thing I would suggest is to not limit yourself to being hosted by sites such as godaddy, homestead, etc etc. There are some great individuals who have their own servers that host as well. I can suggest someone who is having a sale right now on hosting services (and does hosting for my site as well).
Unless you are fluent with HTML and the like, you'll need some basic website building software. I use WYSIWYG WebBuilder 5. It's not expensive and you can do a lot of things with it.
Best of luck!