I feel lucky as a cross stitch newbie, because I came to the hobby with a solid background in knitting. The planning stages of cross stitch bear a lot in common with the planning stages of knitting. Substitute count for gauge, and you're ready to go.
Graph paper is a cross stitcher's best friend. If you don't have some, but you have a printer and a spreadsheet program like Excel, you can make some. You just have to change the cell size so that they are all square.
In Excel just select all the columns, right click, choose "Column width…" and you're ready to go. You can either choose "Print gridlines" on the Print Preview dialog window, or select the whole thing and choose gridline borders. Presto: graph paper!
You can also find free printable graph paper online, of course. And there are sites that convert your photos to cross stitch patterns, but my results have been... mixed.
I had a terrible time at first, trying to do my own text from a charted alphabet. Then I discovered this amazing online tool, which creates a charted alphabet to your heart's desire. It's a little tricky to pick out your words from alphabetized buttons rather than a QWERTY arrangement, but let's not be nitpicky. This free tool is a lifesaver! It even has options for both stitched alphabets and backstitch. THANK YOU.
I haven't had as much luck finding free cross stitch border and flourish patterns online. I found a few sites, but it's pretty minimal. You may find yourself having to chart those out by hand after eyeballing other people's patterns, or getting a book. There are tons of books you can buy or check out from the library that are chock full of cross stitch patterns and borders.
And finally, before you begin, I recommend making a photocopy of your design. That way if some terrible fate befalls it, like you spill coffee on it or leave it on the bus, you won't have lost all that painstaking work that you did!
Image courtesy Flickr/sappymoosetree
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