Best business website in a box for an absolute beginner?

I've moved a couple of clients off of Yahoo. Don't go there.

http://www.squarespace.com, squarespace, squarespace. I'm not sure how bilingual you can get, but it's dead simple to make, easy to customize and they have a shopping cart module where (apparently, I haven't used it myself) you just enter some basic bank details and they handle all the credit card processing. Eventually you should hire a designer or design team and have something custom, but that's for when things take off. Getting off the ground should be frictionless, and you don't want to deal with design decisions when you're trying to launch a business, unless design is a major part of your business.

Hi - I do e-comm. No personal experience with Squarespace, but either go with something like that from a reputable company that can offer a PCI certified solution, or use something like PayPal buttons for online payment. DO NOT let a friendly neighborhood web dude rig you something up to accept credit cards and hand-wave the security issues. They're fine (some of them anyway) at making web sites look and perform okay cosmetically, which is really all you need for a small business that just wants to put brochure/menu style info on the air, but the variety and type of insecure practices I've seen is horrifying. I've seen everything up to and including E-MAILING CC info from a web form to the owner's in-box. If you're not an expert in these issues, you have to go with a solution that's based on a major company's expertise, end-to-end.

Wordpress seems to have come out on top as the best solution for your present needs (getting simple sites up fast), but I don't know how hard it is to expand a Wordpress site to have shopping carts etc. From a client point of view, this comes to hiring someone who specializes in customizing Wordpress templates to suit you, rather than hiring a designer who builds you a bespoke site from scratch. A need for dual languages is called "localization" in web site jargon, and I am pretty sure that Wordpress supports it. Deciding if something like that will work for you, or if you do need a completely custom site, can get tricky as you grow and your web sites needs become more complex. But it's a good place to start for a site with just information, events, contact, press, etc.

Seconding Squarespace. Easy to get a glossy site up fast, the commerce element is pretty great, and you don't have the constant need for updates to plug security holes (or worse, to root out malware because you got hacked) that you tend to find in anything built on Wordpress.

Squarespace covers your technical requirements (and their marketing blitz is huge, so it's easy to find a 10% discount code... just listen to any tech podcast for more 15 minutes, really), but it looks like supporting multiple languages is http://answers.squarespace.com/questions/66/can-we-create-true-multi-lingual-sites-on-v6.

In addition to offering domain names, Yahoo Small Business offers Website building tools. I've never used them, but I just wanted to throw it out there so you have some more options to review. Good luck in your business endeavour!

Another vote for Squarespace (though the commerce service is US only for now, so I can't use it). I work pretty closely with dozens of ecommerce business owners, and I have heard many a WordPress horror story.

My brother uses and loves http://www.shopify.com/. Looks like the front end can be in http://www.shopify.com/faq/which-languages-are-supported, but the administrative dashboard will always be in English.