Hi, tamsinthai. I am also a newbie and had almost similar questions (just a couple of days ago). I went with bluehost (although I'm based in Europe). Until now it all works fine. I even managed to come along with Cpanel (there are really good video tutorials etc.).

I'm also using Wordpress (I bought the thesis theme, but I'm still just running with tesis on my local XAMPP test server). A very good free WP theme (it is from the same developer as thesis, Chris Pearson) is "neoclassical" (I use this theme for my life 'test' blog). This one comes with a header with rotating images. Changing the images is quite straightforward (you just have to overwrite the default images which are in a specific folder of the neoclassical theme). Check out the information on the neoclassical theme over at Christ Pearson's blog. You can google for it. The name of his blog is pearsonized (or something like that).

I'm pretty sure, you will enjoy this theme. It is also extremely nice designed from a typographical point of view (and optimized for SEO).

Cheers