H81 motherboards are fine if it provides all the features you plan to use (it does for 95% of people). It has USB3.0, SATA3, a PCI-E x16 slot. It would not do if you plan to use multiple video cards, use more than 2 sticks of RAM, or have more than 2 SSD's (it only has 2 SATA3 ports) or more than 2 external hard drives (it usually has only 2 USB3 ports).
A good alternative if you want newer tech is an H97 mobo. Z97 mobo of course are great, but they have features most people don't use like multiple GPU supoort and overclocking support. There are a few other features available on the Z97 but I don't remember them all.
An SSD would work nicely with just about any setup. I've used them in everything from an old netbook to my MacBook Pro, to my gaming machine, to my server and they all benefitted from the speed.