A Web Application delivers a more sophisticated and interactive user experience than conventional websites. In many cases, the Web Application will be a customer facing interactive website that enables you to do business on the Web. A typical example of a well-known Web Application is eBay: although eBay includes some e-commerce elements (such as the transfer of funds between accounts), it is primarily a Web Application due to the interactivity between its users in the form of auctioning and feedback.

Web Applications are less likely to be built on top of third-party e-commerce or CMS platforms and are instead normally written from scratch. The fact that Web Applications are bespoke software development projects essentially means that the sky’s the limit in terms of what they can be made to do.

If you have specialist requirements (such as a requirement for integration with another system) and you’d like your project to be web-based, you’re probably going to need a Web Application.

HTML, CSS, JavaScript and AJAX for the user-interface; Flash or Silverlight for an enhanced user experience; a web-programming language such as ASP.NET or PHP to deliver bespoke functionality; and a database to reliably store all sorts of information including usage statistics, user/customer data and application-specific requirements.

*The technologies used in any project may vary considerably. This estimation is used purely to illustrate the complexity involved in projects of this type.

First and foremost, by opting to launch your project as a Web Application (as opposed to a Desktop Application), you immediately make it accessible to a mass audience - an audience that is simply defined as people with Internet access and a modern Internet browser.

Web Applications are also much easier to update than their Desktop counterparts. To update a Web Application, the amendments only need to be made to one place: the server on which the Web Application runs. To update a Desktop Application, however, is a much more complicated task: patches need to be developed, tested and finally distributed to each and every one of the end users of the application.

Finally, relative to conventional websites, a Web Application is more likely to score better on the basis of receiving return visitors. The logic is simple: a Web Application is more interactive than a Brochure site, so users are more likely to return to use it a second time and to check for updates.