There's a lot myself and others could offer, but to start simple, I would recommend looking into using Wordpress or another blogging engine. It's a free and open source blogging tool. Plenty of plugins and tutorials already exist, making it easier. Register your domain name and get webspace from a reputable site (start with virtual shared hosting, you won't need more until you have the traffic to justify it).
Do some basic layout designs on paper so you know how you want the site to navigate--this will tell you after you set the site up what customizations you may need to make. Load Wordpress on your site, put together some graphics and design and create your theme, put together your CSS Stylesheets, and play around with it. Do some testing, and incrementally try out plugins. With both plugins and Ads, less is more. It's been awhile since I've implemented forums, but I remember there were plenty of PHP/MySQL based boards that were super easy to load.
From a technical standpoint, look into HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, and SQL (specifically MySQL). If you don't have someone doing your graphics work, you may have to learn that too. I recommend going with a minimalist graphical design. Again, less is more.
There are different approaches you could take, but I think this would be the way to go for a beginner. There's plenty more I could recommend, but this is plenty for you to get started. Once you get past a certain level of competency, you'll be surprised how easy it is to set some things up. The hard part is maintaining the site and getting traffic to it. As another poster said, it's a fulltime job.
Have fun with it. Hope that helps!
