Web Development
A website is mostly informational. What you’re reading right now is one. It has multiple pages, but it doesn’t do much beyond tell you things.
A web application is different. It interacts with you: you view and update information, it transforms data into something useful, it does things on your behalf. Both live in a browser and travel over the same internet, but a web application also needs a server-side language working behind the scenes, usually a database to store what it manages, and rules that decide what happens to your data and why.
We build both, and we’ve built both before. HEA (Happily Ever After), our relationship-matching platform, is a full web application, built on Ruby on Rails, running against a real database, live in production today. Years earlier, we built a web application for a transportation company that let interliner drivers view available loads and mark them complete once delivered. It was written in RPGLE, a language built for terminal screens, not web browsers. Making it work as a real web application was a particularly difficult challenge, and it worked.
Building a web application takes more than web design skill. It takes someone who also understands what happens on the server, how the database should be structured, how the experience should feel to use, and how all of that fits together. It’s the same design process described on our Software Design and Process pages, just applied to the web specifically.
What we build depends on what you actually need. A customer-facing site usually needs more attention to how it looks and feels, since it’s often the first impression someone has of your business. An internal tool used by your own staff can prioritize function over polish. It needs to work well, not win a design award. Either way, we start by understanding your users, your business, and your staff, the same way we approach any project.
Tell us about it. We’ll tell you honestly whether it’s a fit.
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