Although I have been making web sites since 1999, I actually learned some things from setting up these sites. Besides more basic HTML that becomes easy to figure out in the context of adding it to the sites, it has given me several new and interesting ideas of things to do on my own .com and other professional sites. Keeping people coming back to a site is a real challenge and some of the elements of the sites and what I have found by exploring things to put on them has been an eye opener.
Another aspect of creating these sites is that you can use them for profile pages and do some occasional blogging that links back to your main sites. With the millions of people who read them and are members of these types of web pages, it will bring you a lot more free exposure. I am amazed at my msn site that has been up for a little over a year. It gets almost as many hits as my .com site! The myspaces I am setting up are new. You can create more than one page if you use unique email addresses for each one. The first one that I am almost finished with and that links to actual friends gets about fifty hits a day. It is only two weeks old if that. The other two sites I am working on that have almost no search-able text yet and very few added friends are getting about twenty five hits a day and they haven't been up a week.
I have also realized that I want and NEED to create some free code items such as graphics and widgets for people to put on their sites and that will link back to mine. These things are super popular and before I protected my site from hot linking I found literally over a hundred of these types of sites that had hot linked one or more of my images. If I can do that and have the images link back to me and advertise my site - then BONUS!
I am really glad I took a pause to build these sites as they are helping me to better understand a lot of elements of popular web use, components and what people like to see on web pages. It has been quite an amazing experience all in all and much more helpful than I could have ever imagined.
Just thought I would mention it here because I was previously one of the people who thought it wouldn't help me and would probably be a waste of time before I tried it.
