With the ever-changing landscape of technology, your business’ online presence should consist of more than just a pretty website. Having a strong online presence enables you to compete with competitors for continuous business success.

The Internet can sustain business growth which allows any kind of business to benefit from having an online presence. Studies show that 65% of consumers conduct product and / or service searches prior to making their purchase decision. If you don’t have a strong online presence you are missing out on potential sales. It is also important to ensure that once visitors land up on your website, you convert them to leads or clients.

To ensure your website has a good conversion rate, it should (among others) be informative and user-friendly and the content should always be up-to-date. The website should be easy to navigate and all links should be working. Make it easy for visitors to find additional and relevant information on your website by making use of interlinking. If a visitor can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave your website and continue their search somewhere else. If your business is product-based, consider integrating an online store and / or FAQ section on your website. It might be expensive but you are sure to reap the fruit of your investment. Update your website regularly with new content such as promotions and competitions, product reviews or press releases where applicable.

A blog is another tool that can be used to direct traffic to your site and add a personal touch to a corporate website. Through the content you post on the blog you can show visitors among others that you are an expert in your field by discussing various issues important to prospective clients. If you have social media profiles, be sure to incorporate them on your website.

It is important to have an online marketing strategy and know what goals you want to achieve through your online marketing channels. Once the online strategy is created and implemented, track and measure the success of the tactics you implement. The best way to improve the performance of your website is to continuously measure, tweak and try out new tactics.

Allowing mobile phones in schools have been debated by various educators for some time now. Some argue that the phones are only a means of distraction, with pupils focusing more on texting and browsing social networks than on their teachers. Others, however, see it differently.

Personal Digital Assistants (abbreviated PDAs) like the iPod Touch, can be a handy tool when looking from an academic and educational perspective with productivity in mind. These devices can organise the student’s personal information such as to-do lists, assignments and even access the school’s website, thus helping the students to perform better – perfect for those a little less organised.

PDAs are hand-held and easy to fit in a pocket or backpack, thus making it more popular and convenient than a laptop whilst possessing the same qualities: access to a spectrum of resource materials only a search away.

There are a number of fun, educational apps and tools available to help improve students’ knowledge in any educational field. Athletes can track their nutritional intake and physical activities to see whether they reach their fitness goals. Science students can store and graph data collected via experiments done, while Math students can turn their phone into a graphing calculator. English students can record essays and Foreign Language students never again have to carry another heavy dictionary after installing a digital dictionary on their hand-held device. Another great initiative worth mentioning is the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign (in North Carolina) who introduced the Birds and the Bees text line. Through this campaign they respond to sex-related questions via text sent by anonymous teenagers.

According to a recent study PDAs can improve the performance of students struggling with mathematics. In the study, the group of kids who used the interactive app created solely for this purpose performed 25% better on the final Algebra exam than those without the extra support given by the app. At the recent BETT conference, the world’s biggest educational technology show, it was said that “schools need to adapt and prepare for the 21st century, for more pupils are rejecting the current educational system”. When you search for “virtual schools” in Google you receive 387 000 references. “The children decide where and how they learn and if the schools aren’t enticing enough, they’ll go somewhere else.” In your opinion, what role will mobile technology play in the future of education?