1. no experience designing a web page before but I am willing to DIY
2. small prices - can you sell something for a dollar using maybe paypal?
3. I'd like the website to be one I can change myself as I learn what works and what doesn't - is there a way to design one that isn't linked at the hip with some proprietary software?  
4. Can you think of any models/examples of small sales that seem to do well?  Like nothing more than a dollar or two.  

Any "look here" links that have info are welcome!  Thanks in advance.

Sounds like you're looking at either an Ebay store or an Amazon affiliate. I've bought plenty of USB cables, car chargers, and other cheap computer and phone accessories for $1-3 from both Ebay sellers and Amazon affiliates in the past.

Wordpress is a great way to make a website with very little knowledge and should be simple enough if you want to make changes. They have tons of plugins that deal with auctions if you want your items to be sold ebay style, or you can have static prices. They have paypal plugins which allow users to pay directly from your site which is also nice.

EBay. Just think of the PayPal fees as what you'd spend on running a website.

Edit: probably more website traffic also.

He'd have both eBay and PayPal fees then.

I spend $10 a month for a couple websites. As long as you don't have a huge amount of traffic or content downloads then "running a website" isn't really that expensive. I use Dreamhost and they've been great. They also have one-click installs for a number of systems, including WordPress and ZenCart

I'm not familiar with Wordpress at all, but there's a bunch shopping cart systems that are free or are minimal cost to setup and link into Paypal for payment. You're going to get killed with fees selling $1 items. I think Paypal is $0.29 per transaction.

OK, looks like paypal might not be the best choice.  I will check out Wordpress now.  

What would be the way to do credit card billing for a dollar item?  

I also want to have clickable streaming content.

Micropayments are really tricky.

You might want to make a site currency (fordguy bucks) and let people get a thousand of them for $20.

Then they can spend those fordguy bucks however they like (allowing transfer between people opens up a can of worms that you don't really want unless you're ready for hassles) and those $1 items become 50 fordguy bucks items.

Now that's an awesome idea!  So paypal might be the best wayto go for a 20 dollar purchase.