7.Meta Tags Missing – without optimizing your web page with a description or keywords, people can’t find you on search engines. Research key words or phrases relevant to your site content. Include them in your title, description and Web Site copy.

8.Lack of Marketing Strategy – a beautiful lawn without sun or water will soon die. A Web Site without visitors will soon die also. They are life blood for your website. Create numerous marketing strategies to attract visitors to your web site – you never know which one will be most effective.

9.Poor Layout and Design – create an aesthetically pleasing design to keep visitors on your site. Create enough white space between your text and images by using margins. Don’t overlap text and images and avoid capitalizing all text – it gives impression you are shouting at your visitors. Use font type such as Arial or Verdana to make it easier to read on your computer screen.

10.Avoid Using Frames – frames don’t allow you to bookmark page or return to it and sometimes URLS stop working.

11.No Cross Browser Compatibility – you may be losing many customers if your Web Site is not compatible to browsers most people are using. Internet Explorer (IE 4, 5, 6) is currently dominant browser, and most users are displaying 800x600 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors. (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp) . Therefore check your design with these statistics in mind.

12.Outdated Information – your web site is like a garden. If you allow weeds to block out sun and take over your garden, it will be destroyed. Attracting and keeping web site visitors, means continually adding new information (i.e. latest news), deleting irrelevant, outdated information and removing broken links.

Continuous maintenance of your web site is crucial to attracting and retaining visitors. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, hire a Web Gardener (Web Designer), to keep your site looking fresh, clean and fast loading.

Herman Drost is a Certified Web Site Designer, owner and author of iSiteBuild.com Site Design and Low Cost Hosting (http://www.isitebuild.com)

If I was an ordinary web surfer, I'd have checked out by this point. But in name of research, I pushed on.

That same page also sported a cascading menu that offered information for Fflyer members and guests. I clicked on guests which took me to a registration form. And STILL no details on their program!

Research completed. Final grade: F.

GRADE SCHOOL LESSON: Keeping ball away from monkey in middle is a lot of fun... unless you're monkey.

BULLY #3: Sometimes bullies manage to confuse us AND shoot themselves in foot at same time.

There's a small website that rates online casinos. The first item on their "Recommended Casinos" page read something like this: "Please don't visit these casinos... they're rip offs." I was surprised to find directly below that, names and URLs of several major online gaming sites that I knew to be reputable.

It took a few minutes to figure out what went wrong. The webmaster had failed to make it clear that list of rip-off casinos was actually on next page, one click away. He just ran all his text together in a block and forgot those two most important words: Click Here.

As a result, he misinformed his visitors AND drove traffic away from his preferred casinos (which were likely paying him a commission on referred traffic).

GRADE SCHOOL LESSON: If you do your homework in a big hurry without paying attention to details, you'll only hurt yourself.

These three Internet bullies forgot basics of organization that every good student knows. Before writing a major essay, put your thoughts in order with an outline. Before uploading a new website, create a "mind map" or a "wire frame" with all your pages represented and a sound idea of how visitors will navigate among them.

Then test navigation on somebody who knows nothing about your product and see if they can find answers to their questions, quickly and painlessly.

If they "get it"... if they leave your neighborhood with their caps on their heads and aren't afraid to play on your street another day... congratulations! You are NOT an Internet bully.