[stomachmonkey]

Go look at a CMS like Mambo or Joomla, there is also Plone and Drupal which IMHO are better but are less turnkey and require more of a skill set.

Or even a blogging platform like Wordpress.

Think of this like building a house. Do you want to be the architect, builder and decorator or do you want to take an existing floorplan, make some changes and pick colors?

A CMS or blogging platform will let you focus more on the content than the back end.

As far as costs for a small ecomm site you need a cart, for free get OSCommerce, paid, look at Volusion.

You'll need a Merchant Account, you may be able to get away with a PayPal or Google gateway, other wise it's Skipjack or my personal recommendation, authorize.net