Not necessarily.
Wordpress is of course, one of the easiest ways to start, but some good resources are:
DIY Web Design Education
Web Design Video Tutorial for Beginners
Net Tuts Plus: Inspiration, Tutorials and More
W3 Schools - Thousands of Web Site Building Tutorials, All FREE!
I'd start with the last one first, a basic primer for beginners on HTML and CSS. If you want to spend a bit of money, the web design video tutorial for beginners is great value for $20. All you need to start making websites is a basic text editor, like
notepad which comes standard on the PC.
You can even create a webpage in as little as 10 seconds:
1. Open notepad
2. Type the following:
<head>
<h1>
Hello World
</h1>
</head>
<body>
This is my first webpage!
</body>
3. Save it on your desktop as:
index.html
4. Click on it, and it will open in your browser.
5. Congratulations! You've just created a webpage. Of course, it's not live on the internet and it isn't very fancy, but it's a start, right? Most designers started out with a page just like that.
Good Luck!