Unless you're an experienced graphic designer, don't bother with graphics yet. You may have a great design idea in your head, but it will likely look terrible if you try to create it.
Bad graphics are worse than no graphics. Just use text and photographs for now. It's far better to have a plain-looking site than an amateurish one.
The layout of your site should be obvious, and should be consistent across your site.
If your site has few pages, just put the same menu of links on each page.
If your site has many pages, your main links should each go to a "sub-menu" page. On that sub-menu page, will be links to pages relating to a major topic. (For instance you might have a "poetry" page, with links to all your poetry, and a "recipes" page, with links to all your recipes.)
Keep it simple and consistent.
In general, you should only need three font styles. One for the title, one for sub-headers, and one for text. These should be consistent across your site. The mark of a novice designer is to use a rainbow of different bolded, italicised, or centred fonts.
Apart from a few places, this site uses 12pt for normal text, 16pt (bold) for sub-headers, and 24pt (bold) for page titles. All this text is black, and in Arial font. Feel free to colour your header or sub-headers, if you want a more lively colour scheme. (I didn't do this on this site, because this site is already heavy on colour.)
Use a normal font (like Arial or Verdana), and don't be afraid to use big font sizes.
In addition to the text itself, keep your paragraph spacing the same.
Keep it simple and consistent.
Many people still use 1024x768 screen resolution. Design your page so that it's readable on 1024x768. You can always set your own monitor to 1024x768 (or use another computer) to see what your site looks like at 1024x768.
Keep it simple, logical, and consistent.