Good homepage,simple to use

Of all the available options, WordPress is the easiest for a beginner to learn and the quickest option for creating a small site. It's free, there's a ton of free support and tutorials available, and there are thousands of free themes (designs) that you can use.

WordPress also has plenty of extra power under the hood, if and when you want to engage it. It can be used for large, complex sites as well as small, simple ones. Unless you're planning a gigantic corporate or ecommerce site in the future, you won't have to graduate from WordPress to another tool.

Steve

I agree with Steve, but Drupal is also an option. It's free, and similar to Wordpress, except Drupal is a content management system that can integrate into larger programs later on, such as vBulletin, or IPBoard, and even phpBB.

Wordpress and Drupal are both very easy to learn, both of them explain everything in detail. They also both have a ton of addons and free templates you can get virtually anywhere. Both can be SEO'd very easily.

So my suggestion is either Wordpress or Drupal. Both of which are in your cPanel in Fantastico (Or SimpleScripts, in some cases). =)
Or, you can download them manually (if using Fantastico, I recommend downloading manually, as they're outdated.)

Here are the links for the official versions in case you needed them.

http://www.drupal.org
http://www.wordpress.org

I am also brand new for all intensive purposes. I know very, very rudimentary html and enough CSS to change some colors and fonts around on free designs for forums. I was referred to the w 3 tutorial site recently, and 'm going to start learning this stuff, but it'll be a long process. Unfortunately I'm on a deadline for this affiliate site I need to get up. I need a professional looking site (preferrably using a free editor or web tool) + hosting. I tried Weebly, which has a really friendly interface, but I found that my control over the layout and CSS was very minimal. I tried incorporating a free CSS layout from a template site, but it wasn't compatible with the html. (Again I won't know anything until I read up on some of these tutorials) but my guess is that the Weebly interface uses shortcuts that are specific to the site, and aren't compatible with standard CSS.

I looked at the "Famous 5 Minute Install" for Wordpress and that's over my head.
I just tried Tripod and it has a pre-2000 look to it, which is the opposite of what I'm going for. You guys make it sound like WP is the hot ticket. If so, I'll just wrestle with it until I get the hang of it, but uh, any other routes I could take?

You da man, Steve! What are Warriors' favorite web hosting services?

Edit: Just got a suggestion to try Wikidot as an alternative to WP. Does anyone have an opinion of Wikidot?