Domain registration through Yahoo! Small Business is the easiest compared to other providers. Yahoo! runs a usability lab, where staffers track common problems in registering and selecting plan options and tweak the service accordingly. New Web entrepreneurs benefit most: As you go through the steps to register and create a simple site, you get contextual help on screen at all times. We also liked the diversified and multi-tiered sets of services you can buy.

The basic cost to register a domain for a year is $9.95, which includes a starter Web page, and Yahoo! offers 24/7 toll-free support. For $11.95 a month, you get a customizable, hosted Web site with 2GB of disk space and 25 e-mail accounts. We used an easy, template-based tool called Site Builder to create a site and employed precreated themes.

At the high end, Yahoo! offers a full-blown, $300 a month e-commerce package, complete with many site-monitoring and security services.

Yahoo! is not the cheapest of the services we tried, but we give it a strong thumbs-up for the online contextual help.