Remember when you were young and you dreamed of starting a secret club, but you couldn’t find anyone else to join? Well, what if the problem wasn’t that it was a crazy idea, but just that your pool of potential members wasn’t big enough? Or maybe the club was a huge success, but since then everyone has scattered across the country and keeping in touch has become difficult.

Whatever the case, MSN™ Web Communities are the perfect solution. The Web Communities service will help you create and host your own set of free personalized Web pages that will form an online meeting place around any topic you can think of, or a convenient place where your family or your friends can meet and communicate.

It only takes a few simple steps to create a new community, so your club may be just moments away from a whole new beginning.

Create and customize your community
To get started, the first step is to register your community. Simply sign in on the Communities home page, and you’ll be asked to name your community, select the language you will use, choose a category under which it will be listed, then decide whether your community will be public, accessible by anyone who wishes to join, or private, where new members can gain admission by invitation only. You will also be asked to rate your site based on the content and subject matter you plan to include, and agree to a Code of Conduct that outlines some brief rules for communities.

Once you have registered your community, you’ll instantly have a set of your own Web pages, complete with a message board, chat room, and many other features. In addition, you’ll find templates and toolbars that will help you update and customize your community pages. The toolbars function like a word-processing program, and allow you to give pages their own unique look by adding Web links or selecting from multiple fonts, colors, text sizes, and a collection of ready-made images.

Communication is the key
Once your community is up and running, use it to stay in touch with members and to keep track of their goings-on. You can invite others to join by using an e-mail feature that lets you send a quick message telling them how. Any time you log in, your home page will display how many new people have joined, and let you know if any new messages or pictures have been posted.

Inside your community pages, the message board can be the central point for communication—a place to post announcements, files, links to Web pages, or to start a discussion on any given topic. If your family or group prefers to communicate in real-time, it’s easy to set up a private chat room where community members can have online conversations.

Share memories around the world
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe you'd like to communicate using your own images or photographs. It’s easy to create an online photo album that can be viewed by anyone in your community, so you can share photographs of your baby with relatives who live on the opposite coast, or pictures of your vintage car with auto club members around the world.

As a member of an MSN Web Community, you can download a helpful tool called the Photo Uploader (you must be a member of an MSN Web Community to access this feature). Using the Photo Uploader, any community member can add photographs or clip art to the shared photo album in a few simple steps. You can upload several photos at once from your computer, and the tool will automatically create a thumbnail image of each one for quick viewing. The Photo Uploader will also let you title your photographs and add text descriptions of them.

Creating a custom community for your family, sports team, club, business, or any other group will give you a gathering place where everyone can easily exchange ideas, view photographs, chat, discuss plans, organize events, share information, recommend books or CDs, or just plain have fun. They are free of charge and so easy to create, you’ll have yours up and running before you can say “what's the secret password?”

Mark Reed's secret club won't be quite the same without the old tree fort.