how much time does it take to design a website  

Well, I have 2 websites. One for my animal rescue, and that took me almost a week, and its still not completed. I did it on Geocities. I also have a myspace website, I can make that in less than 2 hours, with my own HTML and stuff. I love webpage design.

It depends on the type and size of website. I own a website - www.betterlife4all.com. My son has designed it.

It really depends on what your concept is on your website. But if your not a web designer you would spend quite a lot of time unless you go to some freebie site that offer ready made web templates that you can use free. By the way I also own a website. http://www.websaytko.com . Try to visit it.

Designing a website is not an easy task. It takes a lot of effort. I am talking about a commercial, professional website that could be actually used. Not one of the hobby website which has 5 pages and tells about you, your hobby etc, or one done with the MS Word website wizard. I am talking about the real stuff.
First of all you need to get the necessary information and decide on what technology to use. Flash, AJAX, PHP, ASP etc are all there for you, but getting the right one depends upon your actual need. Next you need to start thinking of a design with pencil and paper. Should I use frames? or should I use floating menus. Where should I place the title? etc. Choose the theme etc. You can check the internet and check similar websites to get ideas.
Next you can go for the actual work. Here you can use the power of tools like DreamWeaver and FrontPage to make your work easier. After coding and uploading you need to optimize it to the search engine. So that someone can find it by Googling.
Sorry for the long response, hope it serves your purpose.

dude if you say the time require to design a website.
i think it is a difficult question.
if you are talking about a design just a design of the frontpage then i want to say that it will hopefull take 5 hours to design an html for a website with superb graphics and css enable html page.
well to design an ajax website it takes a lot of time and analysis.
there are lots of other types of website designs.
so it depends on the work and quality you desire to achive with the design.

There is a web page in Romania (www.home.ro) that lets you creat your own free web page in less them 5 minutes, but you need to have JavaScript's activated.
I tried for almost a month to create my own web page but I can access the "Site Builder".

Well, I have been designing websites for years now. It does take time to learn the language but creativity is the main aspect. If you are good at being creative then you will be fine

You need to be enthusiastic about designing and keep trying. Oh and you will need lots of time on your hands to learn html, flash, java.

Whatever really. Its fun though when you know how. Good luck