Hi
I am a newbie and ive just finished my first site using a template and frontpage, my site is 6 pages with flash, sound and and a photo gallery, the best thing I found was that everything can be easily modified, deleting and adding text was a doddle as was changing images so I would definatly recomend it as I have learnt quite a bit about html purely by experamenting and now have a very pro site.
Im not very PC literate (plumber) so to learn coding ect from scratch I would of got a headache and quit
Luckymarble.com are worth a look! the instructions that came with the template are very beginer freindly, although I had to download program called swish to try and edit the logo, this wasnt easy to use and was a pile of cr@p
Goodluck!!