Web Applications & Web Development

A web app is a software program that you use with an internet browser, in the same way that a mobile app is a software program that you use on your mobile device.

The last few years have seen a proliferation of web apps. Their popularity is most likely due to their ease of use: they’re accessible by anyone with a browser connected to the internet, they cater to the needs of mobile users (important as smartphones are now the main way that people access the internet), and they can be deployed quickly and with almost no installation needed from the user.

Whether you need an internal web application to help manage staff expenses, a web app that you can re-sell to your clients or one that’ll revolutionise your customer service, we’ll work with you to quickly and intelligently build a powerful, intuitive web app that your target audience will want to use.

From there, it’s a simple process that starts with us sitting down with you to understand your business, what your new app needs to be able to deliver and to whom. If you’d like us to, we’ll also suggest a few of our own ideas – we love coming up with fresh solutions that really make the technology work hard! Possible options include:

As an example, we’ve created web apps that:

As you’d expect, all the web applications we build are “responsive”. This means they look great and work perfectly on any screen size: a desktop pc, tablet or mobile phone. We do this by adapting menus, controls and other visuals to fit the device based on the current screen width & height, ensuring the user always gets the best possible experience regardless of what device they’re using. You can see this in action by resizing the window on this website or visiting it on your smartphone – see how everything “just works”.

Generally speaking, the benefits of a web app over a native mobile app are:

Web apps do of course have limitations, such as the inability to access the complete range of device-specific features – if you want certain features in your app, e.g. the ability to tell which direction you’re facing in a compass app (for which you’ll need the phone’s accelero-meter), you’ll need a mobile app.

You also can’t use a web app if you don’t have an internet connection, although browser caching does offer the possibility of offline functionality. Web apps are also slower to load than mobile apps.

If you’re not sure what type of business app you need, we’re happy to talk you through the pros and cons of each and help you decide which makes the most sense for your objectives, audience and budget. It may be that a mixture of both mobile and web app functionality would work best for you; in these cases, we can offer a hybrid of the two.

As a Microsoft Partner, we primarily use Microsoft tools to build our customers’ web apps.

At the front end, we use browser based technology such as HTML5, served by ASP.NET MVC and C# programming. We combine the very best technical platforms, including Microsoft SQL Server (for the back-end database) and Web Services. We also have expertise in JavaScript and AJAX – the scripts that create interactivity on a web app or web page.

We can also work with MySQL systems and Oracle, if preferred.

We know that trying to visualise your finished web app is a big ask, so from early on in the project, we’ll create a prototype that we’ll update throughout the process. This enables you and other stakeholders to ‘play’ with the app along the way and flag any design or functionality that isn’t quite right.

Once we’ve delivered your web app, we’ll: