There are many ways to create a personal website to promote yourself. The way that I did it this was by using Dreamhost to host my domain and utilizing WordPress to create my website. There are many templates that are compatible for WordPress and most of them are free to use. If you want to get a unique design, you can just Google search and find it from there. There are some sites that you can pay for more advanced templates.
Once you find your favorite template, you can activate it and start customizing by editing the codes under Editor. If you don’t have any experience in coding, I would suggest not touching the Editor section as it can create big problems such as site not working or functioning correctly. However, if you have that experience, then I would suggest you to edit so that you can create your own customized site. You can edit and replace it with different background colors, images, and formats. One of the tips when you want to take something out is to Cut instead of Delete so that if you take additional things out that you can just go back and Paste it back. If you take something out and the site gives you an error, the way that I learned to solve the problem is to re-install the WordPress in the Dreamhost. Even though you’ll start from fresh, the site wouldn’t give you an error. Once you think you’re done, make sure to ask your friends for any feedback just in case you forgot to add a page or simply a spelling error.