To Web or Not to Web

I've been thinking and wondering about creating a website. My author friends say that it is a must even though I'm not published yet.

Okay, so lets say I put one up. Now what the heck do I put on it? Some say I should put up excerpts from any of my WIPs. Others tell me to create new stories just for the website. How on earth do I figure out what to do? Shoot I'm still trying to figure out the whole blog thing.

So today I go to one of my critique groups. After going through everyones' work we sat around chatting. About what? You know it was the website issue. We went on line and looked at each of theirs. They were beautiful and full of things they have published, fiction and non-fiction. One of the members has over sixty books out there and working on more.

Me? I'm chugging along, writing and querying, looking for my first contract. The only thing that I have published is my doctoral thesis. I don't think there are that many people out there interested in the statistics of child sexual abuse. While there might be a few, it doesn't make for happy reading. And since I write YA, the number of interested people decreases exponentially.

Which brings me back to my original question, should I have a website and if I did, what would I put on it? I'm not even sure how to begin thinking about the process and deciding what it should be or how it should look.

I would love to hear about someone's process. How they decided to create a website or what made them decide not to do it.