Bitworks Stone Garden

Website vs Web application. The difference.

It’s common thing to call everything around web as web site. This term means that there is something located at the web and web user does not care about differences between Gmail system and news portal like CNews.com. The person who browses doesn’t care about differences. But developers are using another approach. Frankly speaking we are dividing the websites on two categories – the first one is about the sites which allow “TO DO” something or serve business processes (like Gmail provides services around mail sending, reading and receiving), which often called web-applications, the second one is about the sites which allow “TO SEE” something (this sites generally called content projects).

There are great diffrence between web-applications and content resources. Usually, web-applications are much more complex, require a lot of intellegence during analytical investigation and a lot of coding, while the view (presentation) may look moderate or not-so-impressive, from the other hand content resources must attract the audience to monetize content. Keeping this in mind, the work on content project is much more information architecture, SEO and web design rather than coding. Often content projects don’t have complex business processes involved.

The web application is often could be imaged as displayed at picture below:

where there is small part above the water while the most of work is hidden (often called Backend).

Every development team has own preferences regarding the projects to deal with. We have full competence in both areas but historically our major direction is development of web applications, which requires a lot of experience and deep knowledge in the computer science.

There is traditional software development processes could be used at most iterations of web application development. This fact has reasonable explanation – web-application is the business software  by nature and web interface is just interface convinient for customers. The interfaces created for the software applications are often standardized and there are a lot of widget libraries which implement web interfaces in convinent and expected way. You can refer to Sencha or jQuery UI frameworks to get the idea.

From the other case content project are developed in another way. This could be explained in the next way – there is no common  interface suitable for all content projects (customers will not love the project if it will implement some not-so-cool design) so project owners require amazing looking, convinient interface. There are a lot of activities during website design. The first place takes informational architecture and usability design, next – graphical design, next – SEO, and last part of work is coding which is moderate comparing other parts of work.

So, you can see the web site can be like an iceberg where you see only small top while greates masses of ice are below horizon.