Envision an online tool that not only gives you a competitive advantage over others but also streamlines your business. Wouldn’t that be great? Even better – it’s something that already exists and is easily accessible and available for you today – a custom web app.
If you have been looking for ways to establish a strong online presence but aren’t sure where to start, the list below will help guide you. There are different types of apps you could choose to go with – desktop, mobile or web apps but we are going to focus on the most common solution needed by businesses out there – web applications.
- Impact: Web apps are currently everywhere. A lot of the software commonly used daily is in the form of a web application- social media, office suites, search engines, etc. They have become a part of our everyday life, and as a result, they are intuitive to many employees within the workforce. Many of them also provide the ability to link from one common platform that everyone can go to find what they need at that moment.
- Freedom: As mentioned above, you could build a mobile app or a desktop app, but then you are restricted to those systems. A C# application will likely only run on a windows PC as an executable, and a mobile app is limited to either IOS or Android devices. With a web application, if there is a network connection, there is the opportunity to connect with both your phone and the desktop. This can be more convenient to transition between devices and still have the same experience without developing multiple applications.
- Support: Deployment and continuous integration are made much easier within web applications. This ensures quick updates for maintenance, or the ability to continue to build the system out as more use cases come to light.
- Scalability: Web apps are not restricted to individual machines like desktop, and mobile apps may be. When creating a web app, we can take advantage of two important technologies. The first, App Services, is a Microsoft Azure feature that allows us to deploy our code, run the application online and lets us change the hardware capabilities by scaling it up or down depending on the system needs. Charging a monthly service fee is much more manageable then purchasing and setting up hardware based on a best guess of the web app usage. The second technology is the web framework that we choose. This allows us the ability to set up the base infrastructure of the application, and then we can scale up or down what features are needed. Excel, PowerApps, and other technologies quickly become extremely complex once they start to push the boundaries of what they were meant to do, where web apps can handle these scenarios with a little more grace.
Web apps are the start of cleaning up your complicated spreadsheets, experimenting with reporting dashboards or machine learning, and ultimately improving the workflow of business functions in your organization. They are not out of the box, and not asking you to conform to everyone else’s process, leaving you to either buy way too many licenses for the software you have or to use excel to fill in the holes. They will help you facilitate your unique approach to business and simplify the process.
As you can tell, we’re passionate about using technology to help your business. We’re happy to break down what a web app for your company could look like. Shoot us a message and let’s grab a coffee (real or virtual) and discuss.