The days of producing interesting “brochure-style” sites that only provide basic product information to site visitors (but doesn’t let them buy the product) and web sites that don’t educate or help the visitor in any way are coming to an end.

Time is the most precious commodity that we all possess. We chase, often unwittingly, after material possessions, but it is actually the time that matters the most.

When meshing these two points together, we arrive at the idea of web-based apps which deliver a live, functional application that can be accessed online from anywhere in the world, without the need for a specific operating system like Windows, MacOS, iOS or Android to do so.

Get Productive With Web Apps

Productivity is an excellent subject matter to tackle with a web app. After all, we all want to try to manage time, rather than time seemingly managing us. We want more free time and to do that we need to manage our business and personal lives better than we do right now. Enter the productivity app.

Apps that deal with task management remain popular because we’re always grappling with just how to best organise all our disparate projects in a way to not miss anything important while still leaving time for play.

Invoicing Made Easy

The larger a business gets, the more a centralised way of generating invoices becomes necessary. Tracking deposits and withdrawals across multiple accounts, PayPal multi-currency accounts, and other places where payments come and go gets to be a bit of a nightmare. A web app can make this much easier than a restrictive desktop finance app that is only set to work on one assigned PC and only one running Windows. What if you need to check a past transaction while you’re out running an errand? You can’t.

Management of Team

Managing a team, whether a local one or a remote one, is always a bit tricky. Members of the team can be situated on different continents. Some can be using a Mac, others a Windows system, and a few more independent souls could be rolling with Ubuntu Linux or Mint (don’t ask!). What software works well with this kind of mix?

Developing Desktop & Mobile Apps For Many Platforms

The difficulty of trying to offer an application to the masses is that people use many different ways to connect to the internet. Beyond the desktop computer options, there are several popular mobile platforms. Additionally, there are web browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Try developing a separate app for every desktop and mobile platform, plus Chrome extensions, Firefox plug-ins and other extras for existing browsers and your company’s development budget will quickly get out of hand. It’s time for a different approach.

Start With A Web App

A web app is an excellent way to offer a single app in one location that every person can access from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter whether they’re using a Macbook Pro, the latest Windows Ultrabook or a dinky old iPhone 4S. Someone using any one of these computing devices is perfectly capable of accessing the internet from a web browser, going to a website, logging in, and using a web app.

Minimum Viable Product, The Lean Startup Model

The lean startup model suggests that rather than putting almost all financial resources into the initial startup phase, try launching something smaller. With the idea of launching a useful application either for businesses or consumers to use, a minimum viable product is a web app.

One might think that an iPhone app could be a minimum viable product too, and perhaps it could, but it is likely to annoy users of Android or Windows Phone who would like to try out the app as well. With a web app, it can work on all internet-capable devices, so no one has a chance to get upset and positive word of mouth can spread quickly too.

Responsive Web App Design

A web app needs to be created in a manner that it can be accessed from any device. This could mean a 4-inch iPhone, a 9.7-inch iPad, or an all tricked out 15.6-inch gaming laptop with back-lighted keyboard and power to spare.

Because of the many different devices that needs to be able to access the site successfully, it must be responsive. Rather than being designed only for a fixed page size, as used to be the case with websites created a few years ago, web sites and pages now need to respond to the size of the screen of the device accessing it. This is what is meant by a “responsive website”.

Web apps that are built in this manner don’t just zoom in and zoom out when needed. The page design morphs and adjusts itself to present the information shared with the user in a way that it can be easily seen and interacted with regardless of the size of the screen the user is working with. Sure, it’s not as easy to make a few additions to a task list from a small mobile phone as it is from a larger tablet, but users can still manage. What they need is a web app that makes it as easy as possible regardless of the device they’re using. And that’s where we come in.

Custom Web App Design

At Off The Peg Design, we have considerable experience developing advanced, user-friendly web apps for our clients. These web apps factor in all the aspects that have been discussed earlier in the post. Our team is fully capable of taking your initial ideas, sketching out a plan for how a web app could look and what features it should include, and then presenting it to you for review.

Get in touch so we can see how we can get you started with a web app of your own.