I remember back in the early days of the Internet if you wanted to create a homepage you purchased a book from Amazon (which was basically an online bookstore at the time) and threw together some basic code to display 5 sentences of text and some pictures of your bedroom. Job done, you’re online and running the show.
It took about ten minutes to load said homepage and about fifteen seconds after reading it you were bored. Oh how life has changed. For one no one really does the whole homepage thing any more now they have Facebook to control everything for them. And for sure very few people are coding from a book.
I took the creative commons license route for mine. Going to one of the many online sites that offers pre-created templates that you can tweak to your hearts content. Html5up is the site I used. Very slick content that’s easy to break down and understand (okay I did have some html and coding experience coming into that process)… I guess what I am saying is it’s not too difficult to have a pretty slick online presence that you manage yourself nowadays.