OK, you have a new programming language or IDE. What's the first code you write? Yup, "Hello World!" It has always been that way. Nobody really knows why...
The first real FPGA program you write will blink an LED. Same idea...
You bring in the clock on a pin, divide it with a fairly wide counter (you're dividing by 50 million for a 100 MHz crystal) and use the high order bit to drive the LED which you bring out on a pin. But here's the thing: A lot of stuff has to work just to blink an IDE. You need a board, you need to create the pin mapping file (whatever it is called), you need to write a few lines of code for the divider and input/output and then you hope your IDE will create a bitfile and send it to the board.
That's why boards like the Arty will have a bunch of switches and LEDs. The Basys 3 is even better in my view. But it is more expensive...
The other day, we were talking about Numato boards like:
http://numato.com/mimas-v2-spartan-6-fpga-development-board-with-ddr-sdram/The Spartan 6 can use the older software Xilinx WebPack 14.7. If you follow along at Numato, they have a terrific tutorial for that board.
https://docs.numato.com/knowledge/learning-fpga-verilog-beginners-guide-part-1-introduction/Assuming you get 14.7 installed and licensed (free), the tutorial shows every single step required to get started. Pretty nice.
I don't have the Numato board but for the price, I would certainly consider it. I have several Digilent boards and have been quite happy with their products.
FWIW, WebPack ISE will accept Verilog, VHDL or schematic entry. Vivado will accept Verilog or VHDL but I'm not sure about schematic entry. That was pretty useless anyway (for me).