The most important thing is not building the site (lots of ways of doing that) but how you plan to manage it in the future. Even a simple page for a business will need updated, and you (or your customer/friend) need to be able to do this quickly and easily, without any technical bottlenecks.
If it’s not easy, it won’t happen, and the site will quickly get stale. They are many small sites out there where people have put lots of effort into the initial design and build, but have no plan for subsequent updates.
I would recommend using a content management system (lots to choose from, but WordPress is very popular) and if it is a small site, don’t bother starting from scratch with the installation. Get a host that will provide the CMS framework already set up, so you concentrate on designing the page content.