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Welcome to the Ksense Technology Podcast where we discuss the trends in software development, web applications, and how custom software can help businesses scale. Ksense is a full-stack software development company using state-of-the-art technologies to build cutting-edge applications. With over a decade of software development experience, our team is confident we will deliver results for your organization.
[Kelson Erwin]
If we wanted user logins, the worst thing that we could do would be to try to make WordPress into a web application.
[Calvin Smith]
They're about user experience, users can do things, they can engage with the web app, they can actually use it for things.
[David Guthrie]
Websites and web apps are similar in the same way that squares and rectangles are similar. Web app is always a website, but a website is not always a web app. Welcome to the podcast, everybody.
I'm here today with Kelson and Calvin from KSense Technology Group. What they do is they build custom business tools and software for all kinds of organizations around the world. I'm really excited to talk today about the difference between a website and a web app.
What's the difference? When do you need one or the other? How do you choose between those?
Thanks for joining me, guys. Yeah, no problem. Let's jump into that first question.
What's the difference between a website and a web application?
[Calvin Smith]
Well, a website is basically what you might call front facing or client facing a lot of the time, and it's basically a static place for content. The website is for going to and viewing. People go to review the content.
That's all they can really do on the website. They might be able to do some basic things like watch videos and maybe open up different parts of the website and interact with different elements. But ultimately, the website is for viewing content, and a web app is for doing more than just viewing content.
It's for also creating records, updating records, deleting records, and doing other things that require actual features and actual interaction at a deeper level with a database. In a lot of ways, websites do merge into web apps because sometimes you need those type of features on your website as well. When people think of website and web app, they may confuse them in their mind because a lot of times they are similar, but depending on what technology you use, they can be built very differently and they can have very different use cases.
So there are a lot of differences, but there are also a lot of similarities.
[Kelson Erwin]
Yeah, and I don't think there's one litmus test that you can use to kind of decide whether you need a web app or a website. But if there were one, then it would be how interactive is the product that you need? Is it primarily informational, like highly content focused?
Is it something that users are not going to need to perform functions? If so, you probably can just build a simple, traditional website. But if you need functions and it's highly function focused, then you're going to need yourself a web app.
And there used to be like a really solid line between websites and web apps. And over time, it's kind of turned into more of a hybrid scenario, which we'll get into a little bit later, I'm sure, talking about how websites are turning into web apps.
[David Guthrie]
So the primary difference is how interactive it needs to be, how you need to interact with data, right?
[Kelson Erwin]
So yeah, I'll give some examples for you. So if you are a plumber that service service is your local city, when somebody comes to your website, what do they need to be able to do, right? They need to be able to read about your service offerings, maybe your pricing.
They need to read about who you are. And the only function that that person might need to be able to do is send you a message or maybe a scheduling appointment. Those would be considered web app components that you put into the website.
So in that case, you could go with a traditional website. You could do something like a low code, like Squarespace, WordPress, Weebly. There's a hundred of them out there and you can build them yourself for quite cheap using a template.
However, if you want something to where somebody comes to your site and your plumber and they're able to request the appointment, but they're also able to track where your technicians or your plumbers, where they're at, you know, and you can go in and you can change your appointment and you can see all your purchases, now we're talking about more functions, right? These aren't just functions that are going to be easily embedded into the site and they're definitely not something that Squarespace is going to be able to do. And so in that case, you're going to need a web application and building these, the technologies used can vary, right?
Like if it's just content focused, there's so many off the shelf products. But once you get more specific and you need more unique functions, then you're probably going to be looking for a web app that can either handle it, something off the shelf, a low code tool, or something fully custom.
[Calvin Smith]
Another way to put it is, do you need to save data? Do you need to create new data and save it somewhere? If so, then that's probably a web app because websites are not designed really to create new data.
They're just designed to show people data you are, that you put there once and that's it, you know, or maybe you updated it from time to time. If the users of the website need to go and they need to create records or create data and save it, that's a web app. If the administrator in the back end is creating articles or whatever, that could still be a website.
But like if the actual end user is creating data on the platform, that's a web app. And a lot of times you will have like if you send someone a message like a contact us form, for example, they're creating that message and they're sending it to you. But like Kelsey was saying, that's a component that probably uses some sort of web app or external service to then send that email or create that record or whatnot.
So that's actually a web app that's embedded on your website. Basically, if you have Calendly, for example, on your website to schedule appointments, Calendly is a web app. That's a whole platform where you can do all sorts of things, right?
And you can create different appointment types and all this stuff. So do the end users need to create data and save it in a database? Then it's a web app.
[Kelson Erwin]
That might be a good litmus test. But like I said, there's not a single one. For example, if you have a high end product like an airplane or like a car and on your website, you want to show like a 3D rendering of it and people can kind of build one, they wouldn't be necessarily creating data.
They'd be manipulating a 3D model through the browser. But it would still be a web application. The reason for that is because the technologies that are needed are technologies that require servers and things like that.
But it's a good litmus test. If you need your users, your website visitors to create data, then it's most likely going to be a web application.
[Calvin Smith]
Because on the flip side, you know, you have WordPress and, you know, the infrastructure that runs WordPress, you could argue, well, that's PHP, that's server side code, you know, like. But the way it's used, it does not lend itself to users coming and coming to the website. And when they leave, the website has changed because they've added something.
It's static, right? It's the content. The only way the content changes is if the person in the back and the WordPress admin logs in and actually adds content to it.
So in that sense, for the WordPress admin, it's a web app in a sense because they're actually logging in, they're creating new articles, posting them, and there's all sorts of functionality. You can even add custom code to those. So that actually kind of is a web app, the WordPress platform.
But for the visitor that actually goes to the site, that's a website because it's just a static page, basically. But I can see how that 3D rendering example would be a pretty interesting edge case because that's more complex than a lot of web app features you'll find out there.
[Kelson Erwin]
And I think the only reason that we're drawing a hard line or attempting to write between a traditional website and a web application is so that we can emphasize which decision to make as a business owner. Right. How do you know what you need in terms of like cost and what's going to be better for your SEO and what's going to be the development process for these things?
That's where it's kind of important to know kind of what you need. Because, for example, we as an agency, we specialize in web applications, but we don't do like informational brochure style websites. So it's important for you to know kind of a little bit closer to what you need, whether it's a traditional website or a web application, because it impacts so many things.
And obviously you can build a web application that serves traditional website content. So the lines are are blurring over time. There in the past, it used to be a lot more cut and dry.
I think that in the next five, ten years, really, websites will be completely obsolete in the traditional style and every website will be a web application.
[David Guthrie]
Yeah, I can definitely see what you guys were talking about where the line gets blurred a little bit, especially as technology progresses. But you guys touched on some really interesting things there. Let's let's dig into some of those topics, because like you said, the really important thing here is what do you need?
What do you need to happen for your customer? Are you more focused on a simple, cheap solution that's just going to put your information out there, you know, get your web presence out there? Or are you looking to accomplish something with this piece of technology?
So let's dive into that. You mentioned some of the pros and cons, you know, the development process, how easy it is to change things and, you know, modify the website or the web app. Let's let's dig into some of those.
What are some of those pros and cons or those benefits to one or the other?
[Kelson Erwin]
Yeah, we need to go back to it being black and white in order to have that conversation, really, which a lot of for a lot of people, it is, you know, they're either they're either choosing a traditional website or they're they're choosing a web application. So in the case of a traditional website, you're going to be able to stand them up a lot faster, and you probably don't need any coding tools to do it. There's a lot of off the shelf products.
I'm sure you heard of Squarespace, Weebly, WordPress. Generally speaking, they can be better for the search engines. Search engines know very well how to how to crawl WordPress sites and users.
They know their way around them really well, too. So you can generally find a template, get them built off the ground very quickly. And then it's also a lot easier for a non-technical team to manage.
For example, the our website is built in WordPress and we'll probably end up rebuilding it pretty soon in a technology that's a little bit more feature proof. But we were able we're able to move and be so flexible because of the drag and drop functionality that we have chosen that it's a it's a better investment to choose what we would consider like a low code tool rather than building something completely custom. For a web application, it's going to be far superior.
Like if we wanted user logins, the worst thing that we could do would be to try to make WordPress into a web application like or like Squarespace, like adding custom code to these to be able to make them into a web application is a pretty poor choice. So you're going to want a technology or group of technologies that are specially designed just for the building of web applications. And those are going to be able to handle a lot more complex user interactions.
You can have notifications. You'll have a much, you know, more personalized experience for the user. That's a lot closer to your branding.
And then you'll have a lot of newer technologies that are coming out that you can use like progressive web apps where you can almost make the application that's running in the browser feel just like a native mobile app that you would download from like the Play Store. But, you know, the web application comes at a cost as well. It's not something that non-technical teams are going to be able to handle.
You know, it's going to take a lot more time, effort and money to spin them up.
[Calvin Smith]
With your point about how how websites sort of merge into web apps, especially nowadays, as time goes on, people want more and more web app like features on their websites, right? So when they want because web apps are like they're about user experience. Users can do things.
They can engage with the web app. They can actually use it for things. And if you can make your website feel like that, then that's good for your brand.
That's good for that's good for user retention. Like there's a lot of benefits to it. And it's just more fancy.
People like fancy, nice things, right? So, of course, they're going to like start moving in that direction. Even WordPress now, a lot of you can do a lot of fancy stuff with WordPress.
In fact, I want to share my screen and just show an example of this. So let me just share really quick and I'll show you guys what I'm talking about. So take a look at this, this website.
So this is like a website that you might see back when the web was first invented. So this, as you can see here, this website is basically just a document. It's literally just a text document, like an HTML document with some CSS.
And it's extremely basic. You can't do like it doesn't look fancy and it's it's it doesn't have very much functionality to it. So nowadays, people are doing more like that, more like this right here.
So this is our website and it's built on WordPress. See, there's more functionality here. You can actually click around and things and, you know, the UI elements respond.
There's, you know, it's a little more dynamic. It's definitely looks a lot better, right? But you can notice here, like if I go to the home page, I mean, it's actually pretty fast, but a lot of the WordPress sites, you'll notice a few a few seconds of loading time like they're they're not necessarily super fast.
Also, they're sort of limited in in what you can do, even though you can do quite a bit with them, you know, you can see here, it's not like this is groundbreaking, like as far as the style, it's it looks pretty good. But ultimately, you can kind of see how it's really just like this, but a little bit more fancy and a little with a little bit better user interface, right? So it's, you know, it's text documents still.
It's still fundamentally the same type of thing, even though it looks nicer. Now, the cool thing for so for those of you out there who are actually interested in a website, right? You're actually looking for a website.
But the thing is, you're you don't just want any website. You want a website that is literally as good as it can get. And maybe even you want your website to also be a web app.
Take a look at these websites right here. So these websites are actually web apps. And so this is one example.
And here's another example. And what what makes these web apps is that they are actually built with React or, you know, a framework like that. They're built with fully custom code.
So basically what you can do, they're they're extremely fast. You can feel the difference. I'm not sure if you can really see it as I'm as I'm scrolling through and clicking through things.
But I can definitely feel the difference as I'm using this. It's a lot more responsive and you can have a lot more animations. You know, you can see all these animations that are built in here.
Basically, the what what these companies have done is they've actually built their websites using React or a similar custom coded framework. And that's actually what we plan to do ourselves in the future, like Kelton was saying. And that's because you have full control over how everything looks and works.
And you can also add a login or any type of functionality to these that you want. And you can even have users log in like, you know, if you have like, let's take another example notion. So notion, as you can see, this they have a login button.
I mean, it's fundamentally the same type of thing. You go to a website. But the difference here is that when you click log in, you can actually do things, right?
So it's a it's basically a web app and a website built into one. So in the future, the idea is that websites will be mostly web apps because everyone's going to move towards something like this, because probably the platforms and and the pre built solutions for producing these types of of custom looking or custom feeling web apps are going to be a lot more available. Like people are going to be able to more easily just do this without needing a full development team necessarily.
And also the advantages of it are like as users expect more and more functionality, they expect everything to be more custom. Then it becomes it starts to make more sense that people invest in stuff like this. So I just wanted to show that as an example of a few different websites and web apps.
Basically, the idea is that they do merge into each other and you have the technology could be the same to build a website and a web app, in which case you have a custom website or you can stick with something like WordPress for your website, which also works. You know, for most people, that's what they're going to do is they're just going to stick with WordPress for their website. And then if they need a web app, they'll build it with, you know, React or something similar to that.
[David Guthrie]
Those were really good examples because you can see the difference, you can feel the difference, difference in experience, difference in the functionality. So let's think about a couple of examples of like who would go for one or the other if you're a local restaurant, you're not going to want to build a web app, right? Maybe you'll want a couple of web app, similar type of functionality in your website.
Like maybe there's an option to book a table, right? Or something like that. And so you you get these plug ins from essentially other web apps.
Right. That's basically how that works is if you want to add some sort of web app functionality to your website, you're just kind of tapping into another web app for just a little piece of functionality. Is that right?
Is that the right way to think about plug ins and add ons and that type of thing?
[Kelson Erwin]
Kind of. I don't think that there's a one size fits all approach. And it kind of depends on what you as the business owner want, what is needed in terms of functionality and what your users are going to expect.
Right. Like if somebody comes to me and they say, hey, Kelsey, we are a very small restaurant and we sell pizza. And it's kind of a, you know, we have a bar and, you know, it's kind of a hole in the wall little place.
I'm probably not going to recommend that they do a web application. But if somebody somebody comes to me and they say, hey, I have a restaurant and we're Michelin rated, you know, we're one of the top restaurants in the city. Then I might say to them, your visitors to this website expect the top notch, the best that you can get.
So you're going to probably want to do a web application instead of a website, because you're going to be able to have more adherence to your brand. It's going to load way faster. And your audience expects that from you.
I hope that illustrates how it's kind of it's not really a one size fits all. You have to consider who the audience are, what their needs are. You know, what are they expecting from you?
What the goals are? And then, you know, obviously the budgeting and technical considerations on top of it.
[David Guthrie]
Let's go there. And maybe I can sort of wrap up the idea of example of a business I would go for it tying into that, because, you know, maybe a restaurant rarely would want to develop their own web application. Right.
They'll usually want to plug in something like a scheduling tool. That's just it's using another app that's out there. But then as a business scales up, right.
When we talk about budget, there's a shift in the economy. And we've talked about this in some previous podcasts. People can go check out.
But as you get bigger and as you're paying for software for more and more people or you need to to manage a lot of data or do things for your customers, you know, think about an insurance company. Think about a bank or, you know, any a solar company, any company that is big enough that they've got thousands of customers interacting with their system on a regular basis to do things like place orders, get updates on their orders, right? Just see their account history and billing, all sorts of things like that, where they want to pull the data, they want to update the data.
So let's talk a little bit about that budget. Obviously, there's those economies of scale and it starts to make a lot more sense where you not only need that functionality, but maybe you'll save money by developing something that's custom, that's built and owned by you. So let's talk a little bit about those budgets.
What are the cost differences between a website and a web application?
[Kelson Erwin]
It depends, which is like the go to answer for everything in this conversation. A lot of these low code like Squarespace, you'll see that they have different tiers of billing and a lot of times they're billing by users. So there does come a point where you have so many users or, you know, sometimes they do it based on traffic to the site.
And so you'll definitely you can definitely find yourself in a situation where you're paying more for the low code tool than you would if you would have just built it from scratch. And then you're also suffering with all of the debt, the low code debt, these tools are meant to make it easy for you as a business owner to build the website. They're not designed to build the best website.
That's a consideration. If you have, you know, needs that would be outside like of a small business, most of these are for small business, do it yourself kind of people. But if you have a lot of traffic or you're going to need a lot of seats, then you might want to just go with a custom web app from the get go because you're not going to save any money by going the low code route.
[Calvin Smith]
Yeah. And sometimes, you know, it'll it'll become obvious in some cases that obviously a website is not going to cut it. Like if you go to, you know, if you have Geico or you have Progressive, go to their website and obviously when you log in, you can manage your entire account, you can manage all your insurance options.
You can like that's that's a full web app and they need it. Because imagine how would they keep track of all that stuff without it? You know, their customers expect that they can go to that website and that everything about their entire account is right there.
All manageable. And there's that's very complicated. You know, there's a lot of different functionalities they have to have in place there.
Imagine trying to keep track of all that on paper or in spreadsheets. I mean, you could think to yourself, like, could my business like what if my customers who are already going to my website? What if I could allow them to do things there that would automate the process, make things a lot more accurate, reduce errors in data and centralized data and, you know, make it so that I don't have to keep track of all these different, you know, maybe orders or maybe things that need approval.
Like, that's a big, big thing is a lot of times when you're doing like service work, your clients constantly need to approve things. And so you can do that through email or if you had a web app on your website, it's like it's easy. Just go to the website, log in with your email and all your stuff will be there and ready for you to approve.
You know, those types of situations are really good situations to to want to build a web app, which is another reason. If you are considering like if you basically say, hey, I have the budget to build like the very best website possible. Well, if you build it with React and you build it custom, then in the future, if you need to add a web app onto it, like a portal, all that's really easy.
You just add it and it's seamless. You don't need to do a full redesign of your website. You literally just add a new section to it.
That's a log in portal because it's already built on a custom foundation. That's another good benefit of building custom websites.
[Kelson Erwin]
A lot of people that are apprehensive to build a custom website. A lot of times they're ignorant to a lot of the offerings that are on the market right now. For example, there's what we call headless CMS. And what that lets you do is build your site with the the latest and greatest technology, but then have a back end where you can go in and change all the content in the site. You can manage all the content yourself and it will just pull that information. So you'll have like the ability to create blogs yourself. You won't have to be talking to like a developer to do that.
You'll be able to change the content on all the sites, the images, everything like that with a non-technical team. But then you'll have all of the massive benefits of having it built as a web application.
[Calvin Smith]
Yeah, people just don't know how how crazy the technology is now. Like anything you can imagine that your website could be is possible basically with with custom code. The big question that ever it's on everyone's mind is how much is it going to cost versus a WordPress website?
And I can tell you if all you need is just the the simple content, it's probably not going to be worth it to build it in in a custom web app. Unless, of course, we're we're talking about the situation where, you know, those advantages really matter to you, where it's like if you are that Michelin five star restaurant, then just that extra touch where people go to your website and they're like, wow, this is this website is is nice, like I feel the difference here. Like that's worth it.
That's worth millions of dollars to them, you know, because that tiny advantage in brand, you know, that's worth it. Yeah, WordPress website, really what you're doing in either case, either whether you're building a web app or you're building a website is you're going to find a developer who can work in that technology and then you're paying for their time, right? So probably to build a website like that in WordPress, you know, you're looking at half or less than half of the hourly rate as a developer who's going to build a custom web app.
Right. So right there, you can kind of see, OK, maybe it's twice as expensive to build a custom web app then, because if we're if we're thinking about U.S. based developers here as a baseline, you know, maybe a U.S. based agency that does web apps is one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. And a agency that does Web sites is fifty dollars an hour.
Well, that's actually one third of the cost. Right. But then you've got to consider also that a web app has like web apps can do so much more, right?
You can do so much more with a web app because it's not just about how it looks. It's about everything you could possibly do. What I'm trying to say is it's just going to be a bigger project in general because you can do so much with a web app that, of course, you're going to end up doing more.
Right. So it's going to be a bigger project. So, yeah, what's the cost?
A really high end website like a WordPress based website or whatever, like like super high end, like the like, I guess more expensive than most. You know, I've I've heard or seen them go for like fifty thousand dollars before, although that's sort of like, you know, you're hiring a New York design firm to build you a super nice website or whatever. So usually it's going to be way far less than that, probably closer in the range of like ten thousand dollars or something like that for a website.
A web app, depending on what you need, could be, you know, in the tens of thousands, all the way up to the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, like if you look at Geico's web app, I'm sure they've spent millions of dollars on it. Right. Because they're one of the biggest insurance companies.
So, yeah, the cost difference is substantial. However, a lot of the way people deal with that, too, is finding the right team that can help you cut the scope and focus the scope on what you need and understand how to first start before you start building anything. List out your requirements and your priorities and then figure out what's the most efficient way to build that stuff, because a lot of reasons some of these web apps cost so much to build is because the developers, all they know how to do is build.
All they know how to do is write code. And so every time you tell them something else that you want, they just write code and build it. And so they end up building on, building on, building on and it sort of blows up.
The project blows up. Whereas if you introduce into the mix like a business analyst whose their job is to understand what you want, then do the hard work of figuring out how to design that really efficiently, how to cut the scope a little bit, how to focus the project and keep it on track. Then you can end up saving a lot more money on your web app and still get something that's just as good just for way less because you you were able to stay focused instead of having scope creep take over the project.
So hope that gives some context on like the cost of these things.
[Kelson Erwin]
Yeah. And if you're still in a boat where you're unsure, schedule a consultation with us and we'll help you figure out what you need. We just turned a guy away who needed just a simple website.
We outlined all his options and and all of the pros and cons for him on that consultation and no cost to him. It's worth it for us to do that because, you know, like I said, they'll eventually become web applications and that's where we make our money. You know, it doesn't doesn't harm us if somebody needs to start with a more traditional website.
[Calvin Smith]
What is it like? What is the process like building a web app versus building a website? What's the difference in those two processes for the business owner?
Like for like if you as a business are going to go out and do both of those things, how is that process going to look different for you?
[Kelson Erwin]
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a great topic. And I can talk about that because I've done both.
I've done many of both. You know, my last business, all we did was build traditional websites in WordPress. And so the process of building a website, especially in WordPress, is a lot more like hiring a graphic designer or commissioning a piece of art.
You're going to provide your requirements and they're going to go back to the drawing board. They're going to build it out or provide you with some sort of mock ups or wireframes and then they're going to come back to you and and you're going to get a limited number of iterations. And, you know, since they're simpler, they can.
Since the process is simpler and the requirements are not as complex, it doesn't require a very complex process. Generally, you're able to use a lot of templates and a lot of tools like off the shelf tools that make it look nice and really easy to use. So the the process might involve you talking directly with the person building it.
A lot of times you'll pay like a portion up front and a portion afterwards or or the whole thing afterwards. And then as far as web like a web application goes, there's a whole lot more of project planning, which I'll let Calvin talk about, because he's essentially the expert in that. So I'll let him talk about that and what that would look like.
[Calvin Smith]
Yeah. So when you're building a web app, there's just like so much more to consider about every decision that's being made, because first of all, what you're building, just to wrap your head around what you're building, you're basically taking a business process and that could be a pretty complex process. It could have a lot of logic involved.
It could have a lot of different users involved. And first, you just got to understand that process and figure out how to design a workflow or, you know, a set of screens or something like what does it look like for that process to now be done on an app? Because previously, if it's done on paper, doing it on paper is going to look completely different than doing it on an app.
So, you know, you have to invent that if whoever you're having design your web app, if you're the if you're the business owner and you're trying to do all of the business analysis work yourself, you're going to have to invent that process that didn't previously exist. So how does this business process get done in an app? What is what?
How do we want it to work? You know, what's the most convenient way for my team to whereas they were doing it with spreadsheets and paper before when they sit down and look at the screen, what do they need to see? Like, what?
What? How does this need to work? What stages need to go in what order and what approval steps or logic do we need to include?
So you have all that complexity, basically just kind of planning out how this is going to work. You know, what does the process look like? Then you have an additional layer of complexity, which is technical tradeoffs and and design for how to actually design this system and build it with all sorts of different considerations such as server side versus client side, different technologies that you're using.
Just so many different things that it takes someone dedicated on the product side, someone who's basically becomes the expert in the process and how it needs to look. And then that person needs to communicate really closely with someone who's an expert on the technical side, someone who's going to take those requirements and actually implement them and understand if we're going to let the client upload, let's say, big files, we know that in order to upload a big file to a server, a computer on the cloud is going to have to take that and it's going to take a while.
You know, there's going to be some waiting involved. So if the file is too big, then we need to make different technical decisions. Otherwise, the user will be sitting there watching a loading screen for 10 minutes.
Right. So that's you have to build it in a completely different way. If it's a small file, then you can build it and you could let the you could let the user's machine do it, which is client side without getting too technical.
But the user gets it there because the loading screen is 10 seconds. It's no big deal. So they have to know these completely different paradigms for basically how to build these things differently depending on the requirements.
And then they can turn around and tell the product person, hey, so just so you know, we could do it this way or we could do it this way. Is it OK if the user watches the loading screen? That's something for the product person to decide.
They're the expert on what's what's OK for the user to be able to do and and different things like that. Right. So that's sort of what the process looks like for a web app.
It's it's highly complex, as you can see, because of the complexities of business processes combined with what it actually takes tech tech wise to actually build that kind of stuff.
[Kelson Erwin]
You have these conversations and a lot of times you'll do it and you'll decide the methodology of the development, whether it's waterfall or agile. And that's kind of how the process will go. But generally speaking, it's a lot more iterative or it should be where these conversations are happening on a very frequent basis and working working software is getting delivered into your hands on a regular basis.
Whereas with a traditional website, you'll get a couple iterations and you'll get the whole entire project quoted for you with a web application. That's not really possible because generally nobody knows when it's going to be done. Things are added to it.
And then the stakeholders generally see, oh, wow, this is making a massive impact on my business. I see another area of the business that could be also impacted and improved. Let's add it.
And so it works in these cycles. And a lot of times it's billed not in just a one lump some payment, but on a monthly cadence or for time and materials, which is, you know, in my opinion, the best way to do it. And so, yeah, there's there's quite a difference.
And then, you know, there's also the difference in the team you'll need. Right. Like when you're building a web application, you need an army of people because you have all of the stuff on the product side.
Then a lot of times you are going to want to do mock up if it's mock ups to show what it's going to look like to the user. You know, show that to all the stakeholders and then all of the technical decisions. You know, I'm sure that when Chad GPT was first bill, you know, you would you would input your prompt and you would click go and then it would just show a spinner for two minutes.
And then, boom, all the text would just appear. And I guarantee what happened there was the developers built it to the spec that was written. And then the product, somebody on the product side says, hey, this is not acceptable.
Our users are not going to be happy with this. And so they had to go back to the drawing board and say, how can we make this so it's more user friendly? And they decided to stream the content.
I guarantee that's what happened. And it's a good illustration of the iterative process that needs to take place when you're building a web application that just isn't needed in the traditional website sense.
[Calvin Smith]
Yeah, with a website, it's like you you can see literally exactly what it's going to look like before it gets built, because it's really just an it's art kind of, you know, it's kind of art, basically. So when someone does a mock up for the website, they're they're basically doing a painting of sorts. It's a mock up, but it's like an it's an artistic representation of your content.
And then they give that to you and say, hey, this is exactly what it's going to look like. And you either say yes or no. And that's why you only need a few iterations, because it's it's so much simpler to to meet with a client and just agree on what something should look like artistically than it is to invent a completely new workflow.
And then you need people to test that to see if it even works. Right. So, yeah, it's there.
Two websites and web apps are very different. And I guess that's the main like when you really think about the difference, at least when I do, when I think about the difference between those two things, websites and web apps, I think about the process that goes into each of them and how one is far more complex, but also has so much more potential for the capabilities that your business could get out of it.
[David Guthrie]
Awesome. Well, thank you, guys. So I guess just to recap what I've learned today, or I guess a summary of the conversation, websites and web apps are similar in the same way that squares and rectangles are similar.
Right. Sometimes you'll get confused between the two of them. Web app is always a website, but a website is not always a web app.
Right. The web application side of things is a lot more complex. It'll take more money, more time, but it'll also drive your business.
Right. It'll actually give you more of an ROI if you're doing a good job of identifying which features you need, who's going to use them and keeping good track of that process, that development process. Right.
So it makes a lot of sense. If you're a business owner out there and you're not sure which one is the right option for you, talk to us, like Elson said, and we'll be happy to help you out. But thank you guys so much.
That was really great conversation. Thanks for joining me today.