There are times to hire a professional, especially for the more complex sites, but there are now a number of easy-to-use web site creation tools that do a good job for basic sites - for free!
While designers will use Adobe's Dreamweaver or Microsoft's Expression Web products for ultimate design control over their websites, experience shows you better have a big (time) budget if you want to create a site from scratch, much less to keep it maintained.
More efficient is to use one of the hundreds of Web Application Frameworks (many mislabeled as Content Management Systems) out there. See CMSMatrix.org or Wikipedia for the best listings of these I've seen. Joomla!, Drupal, and DotNetNuke are the best known of these, but some amazing innovations change what's best every week.
Simplest to use, and what I wanted to focus on today, are the simplest, most basic ways to create a web site. I don't track these closely, but imagine by now they are getting pretty advanced. A review of eight of them is at WebDesignerDepot, which I strongly encourage folks to check out. I'll add other reviews as I come across them.