Affiliate Marketing Secrets

I am a complete and utter novice in website building. I have no experience whatsoever. I want to make a niche social network. I have looked at the websites with templates like ning.com but I want a fully customisable one. I am happy to take a course to learn website design but there is so much about this on the internet that I don’t know where to begin.
I have a domain name and I have a (rubbish) free web host that came with it. This is the extent of my website knowledge :P.