Having a helpful friend would be nice, but I wouldn't recommend paying to have the page put up. HTML is a simple but evolving language. Authors' pages on the Web range from plain text files to complicated multimedia experiences, depending on what the author thinks is necessary or interesting. Not all browsers work the same and not all coding works the same on the browsers. If you have a fun, stimulating page that is updated and changed regularly, people will come back to it again and again.
Some graphics are necessary, of course.
Robert J. Sawyer agrees. The bells and whistles and embarrassing noises are certainly not essential. They may draw more users to one's site, but the bottom line for attracting readers seems to be scanned book covers and sample chapters. All of the people I've talked to who say they buy books as a result of authors' web pages agree that those two things are almost always the deciding factors. Once you have a web page up and running, you still have to advertise it, to let people know it's there.