I am looking for a free, paid, what have you, web hosting company that
does a lot of the leg work for you.  Eg. sets up templates, has a form
maker, mailer, forum tools, etc. already embedded into the site and
there for easy use for folks that have minimal to moderate skills. 
There are some sites like freewebs.com and tripod.com but what I want
to know is who has the best services for the best price or free, with
no or minimal banner ads as well.

I can only tell you which one I prefer from personal experience. I
found that TLC WEB ENTERPRISES is one of the most reasonable for all
the things they offer (http://www.tlcwe.com). You can take a look at a
demo of their "cpanel" (this is the module to which you will log in
and from which you will tweak your web pages) at:

http://cpaneldemo.cpanel.net:2082/frontend/x/index.html
Username: cpdemo
Password: cpdemo

Here you will find that you can quickly install bulletin boards, web
counters, chatrooms, shopping carts and lots of other neat add-on's.

Their fee for a domain name (if you need one) is in the $10 range for
a whiole year and the fee for a HUGE web space for a year is only $48.
Here you can build a very professional looking and reliable web site
will all the bells and whistles. If there's anything you don't
understand, my experience has been that their technical support is
incredibly personal, friendly, and best of all, extremely prompt.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Regards;
tutuzdad-ga

I think Bravenet (http://www.bravenet.com) gives you great value and
has tremendous tools.

Cheers
DK

http://seedwiki.com

http://redcheckhosting.com

From what you're asking, Cpanel, will be too confusing for you, as
installing the applications is no big deal.  The effort comes into
play when you are designing the site and building the pages to
interact with the applications.  It sounds like what you actually need
is a webmaster.  No, they are not free.  Templates have lots of hidden
problems such as search engine friendliness, especially when things
change (i.e. Google Dance).

If you are serious about running an e-business, you should either
learn what you need to know or hire someone that can do it properly. 
By the way, it will take you an incredible amount of time to get up to
speed to learn, let alone the actual building of a website.  Then
there is the software that makes it possible, such as image editing.