No, this is not some insidious plan of Orwellian proportions aka 1984. In spite of what newspapers would have you believe, this information is not being maintained in some East German, cold war style database. The purpose is much more mundane, and much more innocent. Believe me, very few webmasters have time or inclination to look or care about what you personally have done on their web site.

This tracking is simply a function of every decent web server on planet. It is essential to management of any credible web site. In fact, if you are a webmaster who has access to your server logs, you can determine exactly what's going on with your web site at any time. If you cannot get to your server logs (and few free hosts will give you that access) then you are stuck with counters and such, which are a poor substitute for real thing.

What kind of data can you get from your server logs? (Note that Hitbox and other similar services provide many of these functions as well.)

How many visitors do you get for each page of your site? - This is very important so you can determine where to concentrate your efforts. For example, if page A gets 100,000 visitors and B gets 10, then you might want to sell ads on A and somehow improve B (or eliminate it entirely).

How long are visitors staying on each page? - A very useful piece of information which can tell you if people are actually reading your pages or just surfing past them.

What pages are your primary entrance pages? - In spite of popular belief, visitors gain access to your site in every way possible. It's often true that majority of your visitors may never even see your home page. This kind of statistic allows you to determine which pages your visitors are landing upon. Armed with this information, and you can determine areas of your site which deserve your attentions. For example, if majority of your visitors are entering your site on page NNN instead of your home page, perhaps you want to include very obvious links to your index on that page.

Learning and remembering HTML codes is easy compared to what comes after your site is up.

1. Checking your links

Besides uploading your pages and making sure links work, you need to schedule regular checking or else get someone else (usually for a fee) to notify you if they need to be fixed.

2. Fixing your links

Most of time fixing links is simple. Sometimes something has gone wrong, and you need to ask help you sort out mess. Desperate to have your business pages functional as quick as possible, you may stay up late to re-build an HTML section or several pages.

3. Submitting to search engines

This is how you announce to cyber world you exist. but often you must re-submit again every month, and you'll continually find other engines and directories. When you revamp your site, you must start all over again.

4. Writing ads and posting them

This is marketing, and if you are on a shoestring you will need to do all this yourself. Daily and weekly, over and over. This aspect of a website alone could keep you busy most of your time.

5. Tracking ads

So you only spend time and money where advertising is most effective, you will need to track or use software to track your ads. This can be automated, but it takes time to learn to set up.

6. Creating banners; putting up affiliate banners

Something fun to learn; sooner or later you will want to exchange banners for more advertising, or sign up to refer people to an affiliate or 3 - or more!

7. Adding content or new products