WIRELESS NETWORKING FOR THE EDUCATOR – PART 1″PRIOR PLANNING PREVENTS PISS POOR PERFORMANCE”There are many things to think about when planning a wireless network for a school environment. Your wireless network must be secure, must be able to handle teachers and staff work loads, and finally provide wireless access for mobile laptop labs for students. Combining all the above could be seem very difficult considering most schools will have about 100 staff members and over 500 students.The first stage of planning your network is to discuss with staff what a wireless network will and won’t do. Find out exactly the areas where the staff will and won’t need wireless access. Will the staff or students need access in the gym area? Will the students need wireless access outdoors? How many wireless laptops will be accessing the network? What applications do the staff intend to use while using the wireless network? What applications will the students be using on the wireless network? Keep asking questions until you feel everyone understands the capabilities of a wireless network. If you fail to ask many questions it could cost your district a lot of time and money on something that doesn’t fill the schools needs.Wireless networks in schools will usually have to support the following missions. A common need is to provide access for mobile laptops labs for students. Students use the labs to surf the internet, access network servers and perform research. Your network will need to support over twenty students accessing your wireless network in one area at the same time.Mission two,, outdoor wireless access. This can provide a great learning opportunity for students to take technology out of the class room and perform science experiments via wireless computers. Great for students, but a large potential headache to secure an outdoors wireless network.Mission three, provide teachers and staff members wireless network access to move through out the schools with out having to reconfigure their laptop every time they switch rooms. Seamless wireless access is a must for educators who are usually strapped for time and have little technology training. Your network needs to flexible enough to handle staff training sessions and conference rooms.Mission four, Security. Providing wireless access for schools is one thing, providing secure wireless access in a school environment can be very difficult. Security in schools is often the last concern so when planning for your network explain all the wireless security threats to your planning committee so they know you just can’t throw wireless access points around the network and expect things to go well. Students are very smart and often more computer savvy then teachers so if you have an open wireless network it will be exploited with in the first day.Once you have performed your recon and asked every question you can think of, it’s now time to think about what hardware for your wireless network. In the next installment of this series we will talk about wireless adapters, wireless access points, different vendors and how to start your purchasing.

Every business or company that needs an online presence requires a web design company. Some larger corporations may have their own project and design teams but small and mid-sized companies would do well to get on board a professional or an expert to help design their web presence because that is the sole means of advertising and promotion at nominal charges. The bottom line of a good web design company is, Value for Money.For the business entity, there is a lot at stake – its online presence, the future of the business, stability and longevity.To choose the best web design agency, there are several factors. However, one of the most important is that agency’s portfolio and what it conveys about the agency’s capabilities. A company’s work portfolio speaks more than mere words and tall promises; it helps the client analyze and understand its skills and abilities.Amongst many aspects, the ones that are crucial are:• The very presence of a portfolio or the absence of it – while every company without a web presence cannot be discounted, a portfolio is like a mirror that reflects what the client wishes to see. Hence, just a well designed portfolio without flashy images and videos is an absolute must. Additionally, the portfolio must be current and relevant with updated information.• Total number of projects – while the number of successfully finished projects is essential, mere numbers cannot satisfy. However, calculating the average project completion time with the number of projects handled, the size of the project and the rollout can give a fair idea of the quantity of work taken and delivered in terms of -1. Areas of expertise
2. Stability in flow of work
3. Schedule of development process
4. Employee count to do specific job functions, etc.• Type of projects – if projects are repetitive in terms of type of web design, look and feel, industry sector category, technology used etc., it is important to know if the agency can handle the kind of work the client expects. This may relate to1. Different industry category
2. Additional technology
3. Skills expertise in features not listed in the portfolio, etc.If the agency does not have suitable capability in a particular industry sector, asking if they can provide a demo is not an unusual request.• Quality of projects – if a HTML site takes too long to load or a site is overly dependent on Flash and videos, it doesn’t make for good web presence. Attention must be paid to user-friendly navigation, combination of colors and pixels and overall impression of the site.• Real owners and real references – it’s not unusual to see the web presence of the same company in two different web design companies’ portfolios. One may have started the work and other finished it; hence it may be necessary to contact the website owner to get an actual reference and testimonial. Many upcoming web design agencies are in the habit of placing common templates in their design portfolio page with fake owner and contact information.• The web design agency’s own website – this is the tipping factor. If the website conveys a better impression than the portfolio of work, then obviously the site has been designed by a professional or expert outside the company. This does not speak very highly of the agency’s own capabilities.There may be other interesting factors to check out but for a start, these should provide a wealth of information about a web design agency’s portfolio to a client.

It is simple enough to understand that increased inflow of traffic to your site will automatically result in better marketing. However, one should be more precise and say that the relevant traffic must be increased. Simply an increased number of visitors will do nothing to boost your business. It is the number of prospective clients, that is, people who are willing to buy your products that must be augmented. This is known as “target traffic”.This provides the basic directives, which, if followed, can result in a greater inflow of target traffic to your website. This will boost your business and help generate more profit.Obtaining the target traffic: From the user base, you must find your potential customers. These are the people to whom your products and offers are relevant. You can ensure that you target these people with the help of an opt-in e-mail listing procedure.
Linking of relevant sites:
To lead the target traffic to your website, you must link your site to all others who have similar content. Link yourself only to those sites that are relevant to the products and services you put forward.Getting target traffic to your website is the most important aspect of fruitful promotions on the web.The relevant traffic to your site alone can boost your prospects and drawing target traffic is one of the founding principles of success in online marketing. This is also a significant part of increasing your income because obtaining, and maintaining a high rank in search engine is difficult.

The Internet is truly a fascinating place to market a business.It has the potential to reach a massive international market effectively and with great speed. The numbers are astonishing – a billion searches a day on Google, 500 million Facebook users, 190 million Twitter users plus many, many more platforms and websites with incredible amounts of traffic.It is obvious why a business would want to tap into this marketplace.Looking purely at search engine marketing here, there are a number of strategies and techniques which need to be implemented in order to get found in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Other than paying for advertisements (known as pay per click) a very powerful way of gaining the top spots in the organic search results on the left of the Google search results is SEO or search engine optimization.In the US there are now degrees in SEO from many of the Universities/ Colleges.This would be a tricky course to manage though as there are so many changes to programming which are sudden and unannounced that the courses would have to be constantly updated.To add to this difficulty SEO is partly a theoretical science. There are some definite techniques which are well-publicised and which are approved and encouraged by the major search engines. But they do not give the game away. Secrecy is paramount here because of the incredibly competitive and lucrative market.So there is an awful lot of testing and research needed to try to fill in the gaps. SEO experts need to constantly monitor and adjust programs to stay ahead.To show how volatile this arena can be here are a few examples of what can happen even when you are following all of the (undocumented) rules.A year and a half ago Google implemented a major change in the Google algorithm. This change banned all duplicated and affiliate landing pages and websites. Up until this time marketers had been using Pay Per Click to generate some incredible incomes online. Over a period of weeks all marketers who were deemed to violate the new terms were banned.Yes banned… for life!Top marketers who could afford to buy a new Ferrari before the change – suddenly found themselves without the money to buy gas for it!How could Google do this? “I am spending 50,000 dollars a month with you guys – how can you ban me?”Did Google care this amounted to a huge loss of revenue?No way! Google looks only at what it’s core purpose is – to provide it’s customers with the best possible search experience. This means that when their customer types in “best golf clubs” Google wants to direct the searcher to a site that has tons of information about Golf Clubs. The site should also have a large number of links from other sites to do with golf and golf clubs and championships and other associated pages.They don’t want to send the searcher to a page which says “Golf Clubs – Buy into this Get Rich Quick Scheme so YOU can earn a million dollars a month and will have all the time in the world to play golf!”Sound familiar?So the infamous Google Slap changed the marketing industry.Many marketers turned to Social Media and Organic search marketing to replace their lost incomes.And so did the software developers and the creative entrepreneurs. They could sell automated systems to speed up the submission process and create a huge amount of content and websites on autopilot, to effectively “hack” the SERPs.Google doesn’t miss a trick.Earlier in 2010 many SEO companies using dubious methods watched in horror as their clients suddenly plummeted off the front pages and into obscurity!What the…?Again this was a shift in the Google algorithm installed to stop dishonest marketing of businesses. This adjustment to the system had a massive impact on marketing online, so great in fact that the change became known in SEO circles as Florida. Florida – Hurricane – Get it?No forewarning – just implement the change and get on with business!These are two of the major changes but tweaks to the system happen on an almost weekly basis. The changes are not telegraphed or explained. It takes a lot of savvy marketers to get together through the hundreds of blogs which deal with SEO to work out what is going on. Various theories are put forward then eliminated or approved and this is on-going.Currently a change has been made which identifies keywords and businesses which Google has decided would benefit from a local search or Google Places result. They assume that if you would like to buy a product which can be bought in your immediate area this is what you will be looking for – a store which is a short drive away.This is known as QDL or query deserves local. This change has increased substantially the importance of having your business listed in Google Places for the keywords which relate to your products or services. There still seems to be a random nature to which keywords Google has identified for QDL and this will be adjusted no doubt in the months to come.These constant sidesteps by Google show comprehensively how important it is not to be complacent when it comes to marketing a business online.A search engine marketing company may have ten years’ experience but this means zilch if they are not up with the game. Strategies which may have worked last year or even last month may have no impact at all and may in fact be damaging to your online presence.The next time Google unleashes one of it’s infamous moves – be ready to react!