Pondering Starting my Webpage

As I mentioned in class last weekend, I am looking to start a student webpage to support my online teaching.  This will be a challenge as far as the technical aspect but not the inspiration.  I find my students seeming to get lost in the technology of the online learning platform and thus worry about introducing other tools to them, thus my hesitation of using twitter or Wiki's.  However, I think they would be a great way to spur interest and make it more creative then a discussion board, quiz, and an assigment each week. 

But where do I begin, I subscribed to a hosting service and have an ENTIRELY blank page, I played with their templates and it looked terrible.  So I want to start from Scratch.  I bought some software the Adobve Creative Suite, not necessarily for this project but that I wanted to starting learning web design, going to take a online class in it starting 10/4.

I was reading through my Mashable reader items and stumbled across items about Web Fonts, Web technologies, and it reinforced the face to me that this is all new and foreign to me, so I have a feeling of what a first time online student feels like about the learning platform that I take for granted as the back of my hand.

John