There is no "regular" tripod.
Welcome to Clubsnap!
If you do a proper Google, you'd find out that there's actually not much information on the internet about tripods; so I'll try to give you a short writeup on tripods.
Now - for tripods, most of the time what you pay is what you get; things you'd have to look out for would be stability and the amount of weight the legs and the head can take.
For cheap tripods, you cannot change the head - it is permanently welded to the legs. For not-so-cheap to expensive tripods, you can change the head. There are many types of tripods.
But anyways, to cut a long story short, there are two many types of heads for tripods - a pan-tilt head and a ballhead.
A ballhead looks something like this
Basically, you release a lever somewhere and you can rotate the platform according to how the ball can roll in its fixed position, hope you get what I mean.
As opposed to:
The head of the above tripod is a pan-tilt head; basically each time you can only adjust one dimension; vertically and horizontally movement is controlled by levers which you can unscrew/release and move the tripod along a fixed plane.
Hope you have a better idea of what I mean, feel free to ask more if you're still not sure.
Most people here prefer ball-heads; I've switched to ballhead recently but I still personally prefer pan-tilt head. Ball-heads would give you a faster adjustment speed, of course.. But I don't know, I like the longer time taken to adjust pan-tilt head; to me (this is a personal view) it allows me more time to possibly find a better composition since I do landscape photography primarily.