I would like to build a web page from scratch that will eventually be
a professional looking financial services website for a company I am
creating.  What is the best way to do this if I have no experience and
am starting from scratch?

Thank-you for your question.

Building a website from scratch can appear bewildering at first but if
you can use a word processor you should be able to build a simple
site.

The first thing you will require is some software to design your site.
 This can be something as simple as Notepad (the built-in Windows text
editor) to write the code for the site in and a graphics editor to
edit any graphics you require.

The industry standard packages are Macromedia Dreamweaver
(http://www.macromedia.com) and Adobe Photoshop
(http://www.adobe.com).  Naturally these are relatively expensive for
a beginner but they are worth the money; there are numerous freeware
packages available but none are as good in my opinion.

Dreamweaver allows you to design your site without any knowledge of
HTML (or any other scripting language) and can be treated like a "word
processing package for the internet".

Once you have designed your site you will need to have it hosted
somewhere.  This means that you must find a company that will allow
your site to be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  You could
imagine this to be analogous to renting a shop or office space.

Once you have moved your website onto your webhost you then have the
most difficult task of all - attracting visitors to your site and
turning them into customers.

There are a number of excellent tutorials on the internet that guide
you through the process of starting a website, here are some of my
favourites (in no particular order):

http://www.bbcworld.com/content/clickonline_archive_website.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=1
http://www.learnthenet.com/english/section/webpubl.html
http://webreference.com/authoring/design/tutorials.html
http://www.websitetips.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/
http://www.pageresource.com/
http://www.how-to-build-websites.com/

There are also a large number of books on the subject but perhaps it
is better to read through some of the links above to get a general
feel of the amount of work involved.  Depending on the amount of time
you have to spare and your budget for the production of the site it
may be cheaper to hire a website designer to build and maintain the
site for you.

If you require any further information on this subject please do not
hesitate to ask for clarification and I will do my best to respond
swiftly.  If you require any further information it would be helpful
to give an indication of the level of computer experience that you
have.

Excellent - keep up the great work.  I personally consider myself to
be a person who has very high professional standards in my work and
product.  That being said, 95% of other vendors/services fail to meet
what I consider to be a minimum standard of value when I pay for a
service.  You, however, have excelled my standard.  Thank you and keep
up the great work.  I hope to use you as for research in the future.

About 2 years ago I was in your position. I downloaded the 30 trial
version of Dreamweaver, ran the tutorial and taught myself the basics.
It looks like you can still get a try before buy version at
http://www.macromedia.com/downloads/
Good Luck

Thanks for the rating and generous tip, they are both appreciated.

Hi, just wanted to add one more resource for you:

http://www.sitepoint.com

It's a great source of free articles, advice, etc. for web designers.
It's actually where I got my start several years ago.