Xara Web Designer

So I am looking to build my first website. Going to have my photos displayed, maybe sell some through the site, and maintain a blog of personal comments to stretch my writing muscles. I have looked into Wordpress and Squarespace among others. Currently discounting Wordpress due to security and maintenance effort and looking at Smugmug, maybe. One this that I keep coming back to is Xara. It has had a number of good reviews on the software side of things, but nothing on the hosting. I was wondering if anybody here has any experience using the Xara website builder. And even more, anybody used their hosting service, Magix Online? You get a year free of this service with the software but I think it is in Germany. So that does not bode well for response time. And there is NO information I can find out about it. So, again, anybody here have any experience with these products?

I am not sold on anything yet, so any info would be helpful.

what is it? software to design a website? You can get TextWrangler for free and just write your own html saves the trouble of troubleshooting problems that arise using "automated" web design software that writes the code for you. Or try Dreamweaver

Unless you are super lucky and no I'm not going to say super smart, I'm saying super lucky you are probably going to have a lot of questions if you can't find info now what happens when you (we all get in software binds) get in a bind?

imho: making a photo site e-commerce is both a waste of time and money, if people want to buy they will email you and ask for a discount anyways.

Personally imho I believe the cost of all these pre-made photo-sites from Smugmug to Livebooks are just so ridiculously overpriced that I may even suggest looking at Wix or Wembly or a well kept Flickr page.

All of them seem to require too much custom html work just to get them to look nice, sure the first week you are happy with their template then by the third week you are back at w3 scrounging for code