Imagine that you’ve already had a website with a description of your services, a running blog, and a few other pages of the obligatory minimum. But you still feel like your service isn’t as recognized and revenue-generating as you’d like. One of the obvious reasons for unmet expectations concerning business profit is none or satisfactory customer experience.
It means your website may be informative in terms of who you’re and what you offer, but it has no (or almost no) interaction with potential clients. That’s all because it’s just no more than a collection of static pages with text and media. However, you can change the situation by turning your website into a web app, which is exactly targeted at how your users are entertained/consulted/helped.
Though it’ll take you time and money, designing a web app is worth it when it comes to customer trust, loyalty, and, of course, profitability. Find out how to make a website into an app below!
Benefits of having a web app for your business
What are the advantages of converting a website into an app? Let’s make a comparative analysis first.
Now that you’ve grasped the key distinctions, let’s move to the advantages of building web apps for business.
- Creating a memorable first impression. The first thing that the user notices when opening your web app is the design. Do your best to conquer the customer’s attention with pleasant colors and shapes from the first seconds of their visit.
- Solving users’ problems. A web app for users means an opportunity to perform certain actions. That’s the essence of building the solution, so make it functional, easy to use, and intuitive.
- Interacting with users. Compared to websites, a web app allows you to get your end users involved. For instance, you can send push notifications, stimulate them to share email details, get an exclusive discount, or chat with a bot to release any concerns. This will help you to promote the product and affect your monetization perspectives.
- Evoking customer trust. When you effectively solve users’ problems, your brand starts looking professional. You get more visits from previous customers and new ones per referral recommendation.
- Enhancing conversion rates. If you spent enough time and effort on UI design and offered splendid UX, you’d likely turn visitors of your browser app into loyal customers.
- Staying unique and competitive. A well-thought web app with an original style, pleasant design, and clear messages and functions will help you find your place under the sun.
- Reaching a larger audience. As more people tend to solve daily problems through their phones, the stakes of attracting new customers through the web become lower. However, with a nice web app, this task becomes more achievable.
- Managing business processes efficiently. A custom web app brings you more visibility in daily operations, easier record-keeping, automation through API integration, real-time analytics, better communication with users, and a more focused marketing strategy.
Possible ways to design your web app in practice
There are three major paths you can take to develop web applications for your website. Let’s discuss each of them in sequential order.
1. Do it on your own (if you have programming skills)
You can develop a web app yourself, mimicking each UX detail into a new product version and/or adding some new interactive features to upgrade it. However, for this task, you need to be familiar with the product on a deep level and have sufficient developer expertise. Otherwise, you’ll lose time revising, learning, and revising again.
2. Take it easy with an app builder
Good news—there are helpful web app-building tools that require no or low development efforts on your side, such as Quickbase, Salesforce, or Appian. In this case, you’ll create a website into an app for a browser easily. The con of using this approach is a narrow set of instruments, templates, and themes. So, you can hardly conquer the market with such a mediocre solution.
3. Hire a developer to do the job for you
Another way to transform your website into an app for the web is to address a reliable IT provider. Choosing this method, you delegate the task to the outsource engineer or a team of developers to release any tech-related problem-solving from your shoulders. As a result, you’ve got a custom web app with a unique design and bug-free functionality.
Checklist on how to turn a website into an app for a browser
In case you’ve chosen the third approach, which obviously is the best one, get acquainted with the stages your web app design will take through.
1. Defining functionality. It's a stage of cleaning your future web app from any redundancy and leaving features that are the most essential to keep.
2. Sketching a web app. It’s a schematic preparation to design, where you should think of navigation, buttons, forms, and other interactive elements.
3. Planning a workflow. This step is about imagining yourself in the user’s shoes and anticipating their customer journey.
4. Prototyping your app. It’s an interactive display of your functionality—how it’ll look on the user’s side.
5. Seeking validation. Before going to development, it’s time to seek feedback from potential users to incorporate some important changes into the app.
6. Building a database. That’s the final stage before code writing, which requires a decision on which data will be collected there and how exactly it’ll be.
7. Front-end development. It’s a creation of the visual side of your web app by means of React, Ember, or Vue frameworks.
8. Back-end development. Here, developers will build the internal side of your functionality with the help of Django, Laravel, or Ruby on Rails (these are the most popular).
9. Hosting your web app. That’s a stage of running your web software on a particular server chosen for your project needs.
10. App deployment. Now your web app is ready to get from your source computer to the cloud hosting.
Patternica will take care of your web app design
Are you scared of the steps to take while designing your web solution? No need to worry, all this job will be performed by us, and you’ll just take part in choosing a design for your web application.
With Patternica’s development team, your web app will represent your business in the best way possible—with a smooth performance, attractive design, and appropriate technology under the hood. Contact us to start turning your website into an app for wider reach and higher profit.