Yes you are right having a web designer that is able to give you advice or even give the website a makeover is a big plus… however you also need to consider adding more content as well as hooking the site into the social networks to give it a strong influence online.

Once you have cleaned the site up got some traffic coming in you can then flip the site and make some money for your efforts.

Its never to late if you still have them simply install a wordpress blog, add some decent content to them as well as all legal pages being privacy, disclaimer, contact and so on and then point some links at them, once you have traffic list them for sale.

Or you can forget all that if you are going to keep these domains and simply use Adsense for domains so you can monetize them while they are sitting there doing nothing. You never know you might be able to make enough money from doing this to have these domains for free until you are ready to use them.

It is not a hard process to do to find a profitable domain name and it can be very lucrative when you get it right. And as you say sometimes by simply giving the website a small face lift and adding a fe more articles can increase its value substantially. Of course this will usually depend on the niche the website is situated in and how much demand there is for that type of information, product or service.

You are completely right in what you say, if you can get yourself an aged domain name that already has back links then you are going to save a lot of hours trying to get traffic and your first sales happening on the site…

What you need to be aware of however is if these websites have been created with quality content or whether it has been created with nothing more than plr content. You need to make sure that all the pages of the site are indexed and not just the front page.

Having to change all of the site content can also hurt any listing you did have with the search engines.