The top topic in business right now is: What type of technology would help your business grow? Developing a website? Customizing a web application? Developing a mobile application? What type of technology that fits your business requirements, drives sales, attracts your audience, and is affordable for your budget? It’s a big question whose answer may lead your business to become an overseas one, or hold it back for many years without any noticeable progress. For this reason, we’ll show you a comparison between the top 2 important types of technology that your business can’t step up without one of them. We'll help you to choose to: ** Develop a website, or customize a web application? **
What is a website?
A website is a collection of web pages connected under a domain name and hosted on a server with a unique IP address.
Examples of famous websites :
- dell.com/en-us
- hsbc.com
What is the meaning of web application?
A web application is software that can be accessed from a browser and is stored on a server. In order to access it, you would need an internet connection.
Examples of web applications
- The biggest example to give here is Facebook. Yes, Facebook is actually a web-based application because interaction is its main core.
- Gmail.
- Uber.
- Amazon.
- Wikipedia.
You never saw it coming, a famous daily used app like amazon is an example of web based application. Furthermore, there are types of web applications.
What are the types of web applications ?
- Static web application: the simplest web application type
- Dynamic web application: Delivers live data based on the requests of the users and is therefore considered one of the best web application types.
- E-Commerce web application: Flipkart, Amazon, Ajio are the most popular web apps examples.
- Single-page web application: They do not comply with SEO guidelines. The best examples of single-page web apps are Twitter and Gmail. They implement all business and technological strategies in the client-side browser
- Portal web application: Only registered users are allowed to access.
- Content management system web application: The owner can modify the content without any help from the technical team. CMS web application examples: WordPress and Joomla.
- Animated web applications: These apps allow you to display your content along with animation effects. But its issue is that data obtained by search engines is unreadable.
- Rich Internet web applications: Applications that have the functionality of many desktop applications.
In 4 points: What is the difference between website and web application?
1. Interaction
A website is informative, while a web based application is interactive. A website is more like the main office of some business corporation, official things are posted there, as are formal events, and pages that the audience can’t interact with. When a web application is more like a business's stores, the audience visits them, buys from them, inspects the product showcase, negotiates the price if available, and speaks with the sales personnel there.
So, the company’s website is static, with fixed content, but the company’s web based application is dynamic, with interacting content.
2. Complexity
In order to create and design web application is way more complex than a website, it’s designed to be able to integrate with many software types, to be used on all types of browsers and platforms. They are cross-platform applications, meaning they can be run on any OS, whether it's macOS, Windows, or Linux. That also makes them customizable and scalable. Whenever you need to add more features or add complicated functions to your web app, it will handle it. When a website is much more static, if you need a specific level of changes to promote your website functions, you may have to change the entire website template.
3. Costs and efforts
Customizing a web application is much more expensive than developing a website, and it takes much more time to build. And that’s the core. Web apps are very expensive and require great effort. So, if you can’t afford a budget for the web app to be well customized, then go for a website instead until you have enough budget. Web apps either have to be done right, or better yet, not be created in the first place.
4. Data base
A web application requires: a web server, an application server, and a database. A web application stores data and manipulates it according to a user's needs. Web apps are extremely customizable and can perform a wide range of tasks and functionalities like creating, reading, updating, and deleting data in the app. Basically, the database represents the web applications meaning, and how it’s working.
Can a web app be downloaded from the Google Play Store?
Recently, only the PWA type of web apps, the Progressive Web Applications can be downloaded from the Google Play Store, and that gives them authenticity. But regular web applications can not be downloaded from the Google Play Store or the IOS store; they’re designed to be accessible from any browser or platform.
So, if you’re about to customize a web app, and you have enough budget for the progressive type PWA and a skilled experienced team, don’t hesitate to, because the Progressive Web Application is the revolution of all the technology types for business.
Web apps vs websites
| Web apps | Websites | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | high | |
| Complexity | $80 | |
| Teams and efforts required for building | high | |
| Accessibility | high | |
| Time to create | high | |
| Integration with different types of software | high | |
| Requires internet connection (no offline mode) | yes | yes |
What’s best for your business?
Typically, I should tell you to start a website before you create a web application. But I’ll tell you something different. If your business is based on interactions with the audience, then create a web application even if you don’t have a website for your business yet. This is how Facebook started, Amazon, Wikipedia and even Uber, and that in itself breaks the taboo of “You should create a website for your business before you create an app”. But before you choose to break taboos or follow the flock, know the needs and goals of your business before you decide.