How do you make your own website from scratch for free?

Definitely not an easy process.

Notepad is free software - it's included with the Windows OS, so you can use that to build your website. However, in order to use Notepad to build a website, you need to be pretty fluent in at least HTML. Just by using HTML, you can put up a fairly decent, but very simple, website - not much room for whistles and bangs this way, unless you have an extended knowledge of the language. Of course, you can also add in JavaScript, PHP, CSS, or any other language for that matter, provided you do know the languages that well in which you can just type the tags and program it off the top of your head.

There are also some WYSIWYG software for designing and developing websites that are open source (free) software. I would recommend checking out these kinds of software if you are not wanting to break the bank on the industry standards (Adobe products).