There are a few advices for the ones who want to create a website and earn money with it. You don't need to be an expert, just to "work" a little.
First of all, you will need to remember the golden rule : "Money from websites don't come over night."- there is a lot of work involved.
That being said, let's begin, all you need is a good idea:
1 - The first thing you will need would be a hosting. This would be the place where your site will actually place, on a server from where users can access it. You can call to a hosting website like godaddy.com or hostgator.com, or if you like total control you can host it yourself using apache, winserver or other applications.
2 - A domain name. You can register it with any company on the internet. Most important is to be very original in this domain name, cause many of your visitors will remember your website for this. It's good to have a short domain name, easy to remember. Trick-words and figure-plays are high appreciated.
3 - Website content. Here are a lot of things to be said, but most important it is originality.
You can create your website in a lot of web-design applications like: Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, and lot others.
It is important that your website have a clear design, not to busy and full with ads. Most of the big companies prefer new technologies like Flash, but they gracefully combine them with "basics" like PHP or XML programming language. You will also need to know the basics, at least about databases (Mysql, Access, etc.) if you want to make a lot of cool things like login features for your users.
4 - Protection. Where there is money involved, fraud is involved too. You will really need anti-ddos solutions, but don't worry, all hosting companies have this assured.DDos attacks can really harm your website, making it not to work properly.
5- Documentation
I really recommend you to use books like : "Teach yourself PHP",etc. This can be really helpful in the creation process. You can try to find tutorials available on the net, too.
6- Ads Display - the most important
You can use advertiser that pay you for the number of clicks on the ad that you let them display on your website, like Google Adsense, Yahoo Publishers, etc. Most important things are to let the ads "integrate" with the text ( for example the ad background must always have the same colour as the page's) and don't put to many ads on the website! This will only lower your visits number and implicit the click numbers!!! The picture at the bottom of the article may help you to see the correct place to display the ads on a website or blog (image 1). You need to know the top-earning position for the ads (image 2) - zones are marked with numbers.(1 is the best zone, 4 the weakest).
Image 1
Image 2
That being said, all you need more is a great idea for the content, cause " Great things are good".Good luck!