I’m going to try to avoid using specific technical lingo in this answer given that it seems like you are not already familiar with how websites get built. I’m also assuming that you are talking about not just “designing” the website but also actualizing it and making it real. The short answer is that you CAN in fact create a website without coding knowledge, but not ANY website you can dream of.

If you are fairly technically savvy, you can use one of the website-building services like Squarespace or Wix to design your static business site, blog, or even a simple online store and you’ll be able to customize the design (using their interface editors) to an extent that is very satisfactory for most purposes.

If you are even more technically savvy, you can use a content management system like WordPress and purchase a megatheme (multi-template) that contains a page builder, and this will allow you to create something a little more custom and complex — a fancy blog, news site, online store, content-driven web application or something that goes definitively beyond an informational “brochure” type of website. You can usually accomplish the majority of what you need using the built-in administrative and interface tools. And by choosing from thousands of available plugins, you’ll likely be able to extend your site to provide just about any kind of popular functionality that isn’t normally included with the default system. If you build a self-hosted site with WordPress, you’ll have more granular control over certain aspects of your site such as security, speed, hosting, SEO, etc. than you do with Squarespace, and with this comes more responsibility. But theoretically speaking, if you are experienced enough in using the provided software and you have gotten to know all of the ins and outs, you don’t need to look at any “code”.

PRACTICALLY speaking, however, there are many cases where trying to create your site while avoiding any coding altogether will not serve you well or will not be possible. For one, if you are hoping to design a website that is pretty visually unique or behaves in a very unique way — for example: special scrolling effects, pop-ups, micro-animations, very unconventional layouts, artistic flourishes, highly custom form elements/ text fields, search bars, and menus, non-standard image or video uploaders, etc. — you are definitely better off learning how to code or hiring someone who can code these things for you. You will find that even if you are trying to do something seemingly simple such as add a special branding element to your site’s headers, you will need to incorporate some amount of custom CSS in your theme editor.

Certain types of web applications that rely on unique types of search engines, datasets, and dynamic social or real-time interaction (ex: newsfeeds, notification or messaging systems, multi-player games of any kind, drawing or graphics editing tools, and many, many others) or that involve any of the newer technologies like WebVR, AR, or machine learning, are simply not feasible to create with a code-less approach because of the sheer complexity or the amount of flexibility and customization required. In many cases, a content management system is not a good candidate for these types of web apps either, as their primary functions are not centered around publishing and editing content as one would in a blog or news-style site.

Another scenario is if your application needs to scale to accommodate thousands of visitors per day. In this case you are usually better off writing your own site from scratch and avoiding the page builders and extra plugin bulk that comes with a mega-theme builder simply because it can often put unnecessary baggage, hidden complexity, and constraints on your site as well as extra stress on the server hosting it. Even if you are deploying a caching solution, your site needs to be light-weight and optimized in many, many different respects to serve lots of users with fast page speeds and to achieve the high page speed scores necessary to rank at the top of search engines. This is even more critical if the application is housing a large database or has a lot of fancy features on the front-end. Wrangling those extra points of speed out of a mega theme will at least require some backend coding skill to remove unneeded scripts, and in a lot of cases, is not feasible at all given the way that the theme is written.

To summarize, if you’re just looking to make something fairly standard, get it done relatively fast, and do not want to worry too much about all of the technicalities, you should be fine using one of the many available website builders out there. But if you are looking to make something cutting-edge, a website for a startup, a business application, or to develop the next Facebook (and I hope your idea is more original than just that), you’ll want to get serious about learning how to code or hiring someone who can design and develop your site for you. My own approach to a project can range from modifying an existing solution with only a minimal amount of custom coding, to building a new solution from the ground up. It depends on the specific goals and requirements of the site.