Hi!
I'm starting a new company, and we're trying to make the entire experience, from buying, to setting up, to continuing a webpresence as easy and painless as possible. so I was wondering, are there website control panels that would suit small-business owners who know little or nothing about making/maintaining websites? We'll be taking care of a lot of the stuff, but there will be things like settingup emails, etc that the merchants themselves would like to do.

cpanel if you are not an admin. You should still hire a admin.

What platform - *NIX or Windows?

Personally, out of the box, a lot of control panels are pretty complex and hard-to-use. However, with a good looking, pleasant theme/skin, it can do wonders...

Roj

Linux mostly, I don't plan on being on a windows server any time soon...

I know how to do pretty much anything with cPanel, but are there ones that are much easier to use, for our clients.

We use Windows here. I have only been a "client" on Cpanel and a few others. Cpanel seemed OK, but just navigating around some was a bit difficult

I'd recommend Plesk. I like it, its pretty, easy to navigate and sets up some good defaults for the apps.

Try the full-features demo: http://www.sw-soft.com/en/products/plesk75reloaded/demo/

I prefer cPanel personally but if you want something very clean and simple plesk is a good choice. It does not have nearly as many options for the users to get confused with.

i'd recommend directadmin
its not expensive at all, and the user-ended function is great!
however the there are only a few things to set in admin level
in other words it can be said that less risk(as u cant set many thgs in admin level) for owners who know little or nothing

We get nothing but compliments about our Hsphere servers. Plesk does have some issues, but most that haunt us will be gone with version 7.5.

We have completely abndoned cPanel, simply because our users need the ability to mix Windows and Linux servers within their clusters.

i like cpanel!

I would recommend Directadmin as it is very simple and easy to understand.
http://directadmin.com - check it out.
Good Luck!

Originally posted by gbjbaanb
[B]I'd recommend Plesk. I like it, its pretty, easy to navigate and sets up some good defaults for the apps.


I recommend Plesk as well.

I've used cPanel and Ensim extensivly as a client and adin and feel Plesk is overall the best for both sides, its nice looking and fairly solid without many problems.

What panel you run is your decision :) Demo them all and see what you like.

I am using cpanel
i commend it
its excellent

Directadmin

Internet dummies most probably have XP at home and as Plesk has an XP theme, maybe total newbies would feel at home with this CP?

total inet dummy should hire total internet guru to run good bussiness ))

Personally I use CPanel
CPanel with the RVSkins are alot easier to navigate through, the default skin I find hard to find a certain tool I want to use, as their not exactly grouped very nicely.

While we now use Cpanel and Plesk the one control panel that led to less customer support enquiries than anyother was http://www.zervex.com/ customers loved it.

We have servers using cPanel, Direct Admin and Plesk.

My personal preference is Direct Admin, it is less pricey, easy to use, and feature rich.

cPanel on the other hand, is pretty buggy, and I don't like the default / x skins, they're just too complicated and less organized.

Plesk's interface is nice and clean, but some settings are confusing too.

I would rate Direct Admin > Plesk > cPanel.

There're a couple of other promising control panels including some free ones. You never try, you never know. :)

I like Plesk, then cpanel then ensim, in that order :)