Just my experience with web design...
I started in web design back when we decided to go on the web. We looked at having some people make one, but it's not so much the design fee -that's just a one time expense- it's more the price they charge for quarterly maintenance and updating. One place we looked at charged $450 for a 3-page site, which fine, but wanted $250 a quarter for maintenance. So I spent the last year learning web design. I ended up buying the top of the line software for it. Getting into Photoshop and Dreamweaver, etc. was wayyy more than I bargained for. Like I said, over a year and I still am learning. Personally, having someone else make the website so it is graphically appealing for you is a big plus. It takes a lot of know how to make everything operate smoothly.
A lot of the building and maintenance is just time consuming, not real hard. To make our website, it took me 2 weeks, but it has about 25 pages total (separate pages for each cow family, etc.) One customer of mine has a 6 page site, and building that took about 4 days. I updated another one of my customer's website a few weeks ago with his private treaty bulls that are for sale and it took me a good 4 or so hours.
I have seen some people use the free blog spaces for their websites. They are easy to do, but I think they are hard to navigate because they aren't a true website. Microsoft Office has a website builder, but it's pretty basic as far as graphics. The big thing I learned is graphics are tricky, and if they aren't high quality, they look poor on the web.