Web Development & Web Page Development
Web Development & Web Applications
PageTrends Web Application Development Services
PageTrends Consulting is uniquely positioned to provide you with the highest quality web application software to meet your businesses needs. Our consultants have years of experience working with users to define and document business requirements, model data needs, and draw process and work flow diagrams. Initial requirements gathering and modeling of the data, process, and workflows is a step that all too often falls by the wayside with many smaller and less experienced consulting companies. By building the application without a complete understanding of the data, processes, and workflows involved consultants run the risk of building an application that either is usable but doesn't meet the companies needs, meets the needs but is unusable, or is unusable and fails to meet the companies needs.
Through an iterative process of interviewing, modeling, reviewing, and correcting those models prior to writing any code, PageTrend's Consultants will insure that what you are requesting will be built correctly.
PageTrends follows a System Development Life Cycle methodology that has been developed through the consolidation of other methodologies. Using a proven standard process, you will have a roadmap of your project and will understand who is responsible for what and the sequence of events in the process.
During the software development process, changes will occur. Business processes change, markets changes, new ideas are developed, and unknowns become knowns. PageTrends helps to mitigate the impact of these changes by requesting that a iternary of phases be set up in advance to cover any potential needs and to help prevent surprises.
Why Use Web Applications In Web Development
The best way to justify a new idea is to provide a motivation for it. Please consider the following scenario:
A researcher is running a complex simulation on a high-end workstation in his company's laboratory. After a few hours of working with input variables, the researcher decides to let the simulation run, and goes for a cup of coffee at the local cyber-cafe. While enjoying his coffee, the researcher discovers that one of the input variables was wrong. Typically, he would need to run back to the laboratory and fix it, but this time he remembers that the simulation is running as a web application. Using one of computers at the cafe he is able to change the input variable and continue the simulation. Confident about his simulation, he decides to go home and rest. Later, using his home computer, he is able to monitor the progress of his simulation.
Web applications are applications that allow a user to interact with them over the web. The server absorbs the entire overhead and the client does not need to worry about installing, upgrading, or maintaining the application.
Advantages of Web Applications in Web Development
Web applications are inherently platform independent. They are based on the client/server model with the client being any WWW browser, and thus theoretically they should be accessible from any platform for which a WWW browser is implemented. This allows for reduced cost of client hardware as the computer needs only to be able to run a WWW browser.
Many users do not have the time to download an application, install it, evaluate it, and get the new version every time it is released. Because of these hassles, users prefer to stick with the older version even if the newer version offers more features. Web applications upgrade themselves transparently. The developer can install, apply patches, or upgrade the application at the server and all the users will immediately benefit from the changes without any effort on their part.
When developers design a new application, or add a new feature to an existing application, they want to know how many users actually use it. With traditional applications, developers can look at the number of sales and see how many people actually purchase the software. However, the number of sales does not tell the developers how many times each person used the software. Web applications allow for per usage accounting. Developers can know exactly how many times each application was used and for how long. Consumers also benefit from this, since they do not have to pay the full price if they just want to use an application only once.
Web applications also enable companies to reach new customers as users can reach a company’s web site through search engines. This makes the Internet unique as it provides companies with the ability to market their products and services with little internal marketing expertise or expense.
Chalenges of Web Application Development
The web, while providing significant benefits, introduces new technical challenges with respect to scalability, and management of session, state, transactions and security. These challenges are as follows:
- Web applications can face unpredictable and potentially enormous peak loads. This demands a high performance architecture that is extremely scalable.
- The web is a stateless environment, in which the client and server are loosely coupled. Applications must keep state information from one page to another if they are to avoid requiring users to re-enter information such as user name and password from page to page.
- The web presents new security issues for companies wishing to make internal databases accessible to external users. User authorization and authentication are more challenging in the web environment because of the large number of potential users.
- The web is changing rapidly and standards are still evolving.
- Robust web applications must provide reliable, secure, and stable processing under heavy demands.
Web applications must deal with all these challenges in order to be competitive with traditional applications. Most of the challenges mentioned above are due to rapid expansion of the WWW. Although the technology is advancing at an equal rate, integrating it to the real world has been a slow process. Many people are not connected to the Internet and those who are use low-end PC's and slow telephone lines. In time, Internet connections will become faster and more reliable, web standards will be robust and proven, and security issues will be resolved.
IT Assessment Phase
PageTrends provides businesses with a no-cost, no obligation Information Technology assessment prior to starting any engagement. Even if you or us decide that PageTrends can not meet your needs, you can be assured that the An IT assessment performed prior to web development will give you the kind of insight you need to formulate a well thought out plan for your developer of choice. Our IT assessment plan consist of:
- What your business is and how the web could effect how you currently operate.
- What products or services you provide and how those products and services are purchased and how they are delegated to your customer.
- How you sell your products and/or services .
- How you market your business & what stage of marketing is your business currently in.
- How you are currently using Information Technology.
- The goals of your organization
- The immediate needs of your organization
- Future anticipated plans for your organization
After the initial interviews to gather the above information, an IT Assessment will be created highlighting the current state of your IT organization and how PageTrends can help you meet your needs now and in the future.
To have a no obligation It assessment created for your business concept, feel free to fill out our form.