Are you looking to create a web presence for your business or an online store? Are you looking to create a simple website or a more dynamic application? Maybe you don’t really know the difference. Well, we are here to talk about it with some Silicon Jungle Basics.

First, stop and ask yourself, what do I need for my business and what am I trying to accomplish?

There are a couple of things that you should consider when deciding before dwelling deeper into the difference.

The Price.

It is important to identify your objectives and then determine how much you are willing to spend in order to accomplish them. Now, this conversation can quickly go into a highly technical game of pros/cons or specifics but it’s best to stick to a few basics and insights on the two site types.

The Major Difference

This is the easier part. A website is typically a set of web pages viewed with a browser. Basically, this is meant to be a static set of pages that provides viewers with information. It’s a brochure website with limited or no ways for viewers to interact with it. Looking for something more interactive? That is your web application. Web application sites count on and provide interactive elements. These could be sites like DropBox or Slack. The value of both of these examples is predicated upon user engagement; without which neither application is very useful. Web apps provided a richer user experience and access to advanced browser capabilities.

Where Websites and Web Applications Meet

Hopefully, you can see the clear difference between the two. However, there is a ton of gray area between websites and web apps.

For instance, a website with a shopping area for a few products could be seen as a standard, informational website with content about the company and its products. However, you could also reference the shopping area as a web application and include any forms and quoting tools throughout the site in that same category.

The first website is considered to have been built on August 6, 1991. A number of things has changed since then and we know technology will continue to change and grow, it might be harder to see the difference between the two. It’s few and far between when a site only acts as a basic collection of web pages with no user interaction. However, most organizations are not looking for full-blown web applications like Facebook or a customer relationship management system (CRM). Instead, most people are probably looking for a hybrid of the two.

This means that the site you might be looking for could have several factors that increase price and development time. Having a conversation about your goals and understanding the difference between basic websites and more robust web applications can make your site’s development planning smoother and provide a clearer picture for everyone involved in the web development process.

Interested in getting a website or a web application? Please feel to fill out a digital interview here.

-The Silicon Jungle Web Development Team

Also published on Medium.