Well a web site is nothing more than an HTML page. You need to know this (unless you use what they call a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor - which I wouldn't recommend, only for the simple fact is that I believe you should at least know HTML basics). Here are a couple of tutorials on HTML I found using Google:
An Interactive HTML Tutorial
W3C School's HTML Tutorial
About the pictures, well you don't HAVE to have any on your site per se, but to do any, you'll need to use programs like
Photoshop (Way expensive) or
Paint Shop Pro.
For hosting, check
this.