In your searches, you may have seen websites offering to help you quickly and easily set up a website, without any technical knowledge. These are called "site builders". They can be easy to use at first, but they often have many hidden downsides.
Here's what you should know about site builders.
After you've signed up and paid, you log in. Typically, you'll then choose a graphical theme, choose what pages you'd like, and then be directed to an editor, where you can type in your text.
Many site builders are geared only toward those building very simple websites. They provide common features and a few basic designs, but little that can be easily accessed outside that.
At some point, you'll want to add a feature to your site, or change your site's layout, and simply not be able to.
In many cases, external services can't be integrated into the site builder. If you want to use an external service to see detailed statistics on who's visiting your site, or if you want to put a shopping cart on your site, you might find yourself unable to. The site builder may offer its own visitor statistics system, and (this is very common) a shopping cart you can easily add to your site, which sells your products at a high transaction fee.
Many site builders (though not all) are cumbersome or buggy. Because they're internet-based, you can't just zoom around them like a Word or Excel document. They often need to load.
Many of the site builders I've seen are actually quite complex. Some are very much like the typical web page editor program you'd use if you were designing a website the proper way.
Many site builders will offer more advanced features. However, there's no real way to allow a user to edit their site at a fundamental level, without them having to learn regular web design.
Some site builders are fairly cheap, but most site builders are significantly more expensive than the web hosting for a regular do-it-yourself website. (Some are free, but feature ads, or lack basic features, unless you pay to upgrade to a "premium" plan.)
It's impossible to know the pitfalls or quality of a particular site builder, until you've started using it, and investing time in it.
There's no real value in trying to do research into the various site builder systems, because –like web hosting– most of the information written about site builders is penned by affiliates trying to get you to use that site builder.
The biggest issue with site builders is that you can never really leave.
Most site builders will let you take your domain name (something.com) with you. However, many have no method to allow you to extricate your website from their site builder, because the site has been created in Flash or some other system.
With some, you can extract your website in standard HTML code, but the site is coded in such a way that it's too bloated and complex to edit, and needs to be redone.
When you eventually decide that a limitation or other issue is a show-stopper, and you have to flee the system, you'll likely want to learn proper web design, so that you can make your own site, in a web page editor. Whatever you learned about that site builder, is likely unique to their system. Though a typical web page editor program might be similar to the site builder, it's not the same. You'll need to go to square one, and start learning. You'll have your domain name, your pictures, and your site text, but nothing else.
In reality, most people will just go to a professional web developer at this point.
Many people do have sites in these systems, and they enjoy their relative ease, while never hitting barriers or obstacles that make them want to flee.
If you want to look down this path, there's a far better version of the site builder. It's called WordPress.
I'm now recommending WordPress as a serious option for beginner web designers.
WordPress does suffer some of the same drawbacks as a site builder. Your choice of design and layout is limited, and you have to work within their control panel system. However, their system is excellent, and WordPress is very large and popular. It's also open to third-party developers, who constantly make new designs and feature add-ons available.
Given that you can do almost anything you'd want to do in WordPress, you probably won't need to leave the system at any stage, and deal with the problems that entails.
WordPress is also very easy to set up in FatCow hosting, and because FatCow is so cheap, using WordPress will likely be a cheaper and better option than trying your luck with a site builder.