Organize how viewers will navigate through your site, how you will present your information, the type of colors, background, text, buttons etc. Make sure you take into consideration line, balance, space, shape and scale of your colors, text and images. Look at your design and see if it is unified with a spice of variety, rhythm and motion. As a beginner create a simple web site. Simple pages download faster, and make an immediate impression on the viewer.
Simple pages are also easier to create.
It is important that if your site has many images, that you optimize your images to speed loading time. You may import your graphic images to to your graphic editing program and reduce them to a smaller size. Make sure all the links in your site work well before publishing them. This will depend upon the requirements of your web site provider. I will have to do that when I upload this site to Angelfire.