If you don t want to pay for it up front you will pay in other ways. Free hosting services will not charge you for a site but they drop ads all over you and generally suck. There are very cheap and reasonable hosting services for less than $5 a month like www.1and1.com with lots of features and options to help you on your way. GoDaddy.com is also very popular and can be even less expensive if you don t get sucked into all their up sells.Good Luck, but you will pay eventually...some way.
Blogs are the easiest approach that provides you with templates and ability to semi-design your site. Check Yahoo and Google for free blogs.
Read my blog, loads of tips on how to do it yourself :) http://keepersacc.wordpress.com
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