Looking at trying to start a website need help

I'm a professional software engineer / system architect and have designed a number of web site / cloud computing products, along with traditional desktop software over the past 30 years. Feel free to ask me anything. If you'd prefer, PM me your email address and we can talk over that.

That's the upside. The downside is that you'll have to partner with someone else (though I can point you to some sources,) as I have resolved in the past couple of years to stop accepting side projects. The last one went well, but it burned up way too much of my time and, in the end, I'd rather have my time than money.

Realistically, you will have a very tough row to hoe -- there are WAAAAAAAAY more people with ideas than there are competent designers and coders, so we have our pick of jobs and, unless you have an incredibly great idea that would have mass appeal, your only avenue is likely to pay someone to develop it. I only agreed to two projects over the years that I did for "a piece of the pie", the rest were either pay to code, or they were so bad of an idea that I talked them out of it.

Alternatively, figure out how to do it yourself, which is what I would recommend. So long as you have the brain for it (you can see things logically,) set aside EVERYTHING that you're doing right now, apart from earning a living, and dedicate that time to learning how to program and design. That means no family, no friends, no Internet, no movies, nothing. It might take a few months, it might take years, but I think anyone who has the motivation (and who isn't utterly flummoxed by logic) can learn how to code, and do it well.

If you don't have experience in HTML or other non-web programming to have a sense for it now? I'd suggest learning it as you can and starting with something a little simpler and which has 0 requirement for any hand coding of any kind.

WYSIWYG Web Builder 10 is what I am fond of using, at least when something isn't large enough to justify a CMS like Joomla.

Many programs claim to do what that one DOES (Web design in pure visual format with 0 hand coding anywhere, for any thing). It's the only one I've found which delivers and I've been using it a few years now without trouble. It does have a demo and aside from extensions to add later, it is functional for building a website to test. It won't be worth anything for production because they have tags and a 'Demo' text that floats down every page, but the demo lets you make one anyway and at least see how simple it is.

If you've used Adobe Graphics programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or others) then you already know the layout, format and controls of the software. They mimic a cross between InDesign and the Ribbon based command set of the MS Office Suite.