xanobyte -- if you want to make something that's pretty, I'm going to suggest you switch to avs sites -- that will give you the freedom to be creative but not cut out your moneymaking opportunities
If you want to develop the site into a traffic hub type of situation, I would spend as much time as I could getting a layout designed that will be your best mousetrap.
Then I'd build tons of free sites and pages that I would submit and I'd put up a link, just like any other sponsor, to this site you've built -- this hub site -- make the galleries and free sites clean so they'll get listed and then get as much of your own traffic into your system as you can - a web within a web so to speak --
I'd also build a really mean, really nasty site from a surfers standpoint to exit the traffic to -- instead of trading it all away or sending it to places that don't earn you maximum revenue for the traffic --
Use the hub to qualify the surfers and get your targetting down -- build some avs sites and link them from the hub, just like a sponsor --
This is a numbers game -- if you've got traffic you're halfway there, figuring out how to route the traffic is where the profit is