If you want a starter site up in a jiffy, go with a CMS. Joomla works pretty well out of the box. Drupal and Wordpress are also great publishing platforms,too. They should also be considered, since you are starting out at 'square 1'.
Each CMS offers their own advantages - namely, the community. As a beginner, the community of X platform should be just as important as the software features. You will often times spend more time reading and communicating with others during your journey than you would be pushing code.
BUT
As a long term project, I highly recommend building your own website from scratch. I only recommend this, of course, if you intend to become more of a coder/developer instead of a marketer. Doing this is not for the feint of heart, though. There are frameworks to help you out. Codeignitor,Yii,Zend, and Kohana are some of the thousands of PHP frameworks out there. They abstract away a lot of mundane tasks such as session handling, page caching, security- the things we often take for granted in cms's. But in any case, building from scratch is not easy, and can fast become a rite of passage. It takes years to really 'get it together'. But once you have built up a toolbox of useful functions and classes, you can build just about anything you can imagine. And you learn more about programming in your favorite language instead of becoming indoctrinated in the culture and idiosyncasies of a CMS. If you want to be really bold skip the frameworks, too.
I'm sure that judging by the tone of the above paragraphs, you can guess which route I have taken .
Here's an article for your amusement. How to become programmer in 10 years. Written over 10 years ago, and it's spot on.