Web hosts like iPage

Web hosts like iPage (www.ipage.com) offer an easy to use drag and drop site builder and this can very well be up your alley. For those who have no experience in web development, nor do they want to learn, drag and drop editors can be a cheap alternative to hiring out a web developer service. Most site builders work like word processors in that if you want a picture on the page you can drop one in there. If you want to change the style of the text simply highlight it and change it.

Like blogging, you will also want an effective support staff willing to help you out (if the support staff can help with the software itself that would be an added bonus). Other features can be considered of secondary important or mere fluff, depending on whether you can receive some sort of use out of it.

Small business and store front sites run along the same vein. At their base is some sort of CMS (generally this stems from the shopping cart software itself), a shopping cart, support for a merchant account process (generally inherent with the shopping cart software), and a few things that support the whole endeavor. Like a blogging web site, store front site owners should look for multiple shopping cart programs. This will give the users a chance to play around with multiple shopping carts and see which ones they prefer, it also gives the user maximum chance for compatibility between shopping cart and any credit card merchant account processing system they may want to use. If the user would prefer to use a CMS front end, they should check to see if both CMS and shopping cart are compatible and if integration can be seamless.

Everything else supports the shopping cart such as multimedia support (you may never need it, but it is nice to have the option of being able to show off videos for your products, however if multimedia support is not available you can still use a third party such as embedded YouTube videos), possible marketing giveaways (free ad credits never hurt anybody), SSL (shared or dedicated, SSL is often a necessity for shopping carts anyway and if they offer shopping carts the account will at least have a shared SSL), and some form of site traffic reporting. After this everything else is simply taking up space.

Just because a web host lists a variety of features does not mean you will need or want all of them. Most web hosts add extra features because they either want to attract sales or build plans that try to be everything to everyone. With this in mind it is up to each of use to understand our needs and purchase plans according to those needs and not to add too much emphasis on things that are unnecessary
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ