Its great to hear that you are getting your own site. I am sure you will enjoy all the learning involved, along with the hard work 
You will find some great info on here which will point you in the right direction. If you want to get your site hosted then why not get yourself a 3 month free trial from streamline.net. very good and they will give you Google adwords vouchers and msn vouchers(not saying msn is very good) You also get a stats programme to work with called matrix stats.
If your new to web designing like myself then you will find many programmes to design your site on with helpful forums such as zencart and joomla.
I had a few issues trying to upload to my server so had no choice but to design my site through Microsoft publisher. i regret it now as i know the only way forward is to take it of publisher.
Don'T forget to concentrate on your back links and keep it regular. It will help you loads.
Keep unique contents on your site, write articles and publish them on ezine and other article sites. Use bloggers and forums to your advantage. try to get the do follow links so you can get reputation for the links.
Build your site on seo. Concentrate on your titles, meta descriptions and contents. Dont forget to add alt texts for your pictures and use alternative text links for your site. Build your site for your customers and use proven methods that will also work when robots are indexing your sites.
As long as you keep down this track then you should be ok. You wont see the traffic straight away as back links can take some time to kick in.
Use classified adds to get you some traffic. A great one that is working for me is gumtree.
best of luck
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