About designing your site:
First, I suggest that you ask the members of your church if any of them do web design. The wife of my boss does web design so that she can be a stay-at-home mom.
If not:
Chances are that the word processor that you are currently using has website templates. If you want to, play around with this before you purchase your domain. (Note: The websites in word processors are fine for beginners, but they are not very clean.) I used Microsoft Publisher for a few months before I took the time to install and learn Microsoft FrontPage. I started with a single page, then I learned how to add new pages and hyperlinks.
If you are going to design your page from scratch instead of using a template, it is a good idea to know how you want it to look first. Ours looks the way it does because my husband was looking at websites of other churches and found one that he really liked. I tried to make ours look like it. Now, we honestly can't remember what church that was, or I would tell you. The basics of the design that we use is centering a table. Using the "What you see is what you get" feature of your software, insert a table. Then use the table properties to pad the cells. Then choose a color for your cells and a color for your borders. The site that we used as our guide had light blue instead of the bold red that we have. I use the red because I tried to match the color in the Reformed Episcopal logo.
Learning to use your software:
When I first installed Microsoft FrontPage, I had no idea how to use it...not even how to get to a blank page. I went to www.microsoft.com/frontpage and found tutorials that helped me get started. Before you purchase software, you might try finding a tutorial for it...to make sure that there is one.