What Web Applications Can Do
Web applications allow you to collect, store, retrieve, analyze, and present information quickly and easily. You can also use web applications to automate your tasks, saving your time, effort, and money.
Collecting Information
With web applications, you can automatically collect information from a wide variety of sources, including your users themselves.
From simple webpages, you can collect text, save images of the page, extract data from it, or monitor it for changes.
From tables, you can load the data from a table on a website and save or use it in a format that is better for you.
You can use search engines as the starting point for your web application’s work. Using the search engine’s data, you can automatically collect information from where the search engine links to.
You can automate research on search engines, automatically finding the search results that are most relevant to what you need. This can save a lot of time and work finding the best resources specifically for your needs.
If you run a website, you can track your own websites’ advancements, integrating SEO analysis into your web app. Or you can simply collect the data and save if for another task. Search engines are a great starting point for your web application’s work.
You can also collect information from other web applications. This is usually done through and API. API’s are often offered by service companies, providing easy access to their data, and providing a way to add, change, modify, or remove information for your account on their servers.
You can download and store files located elsewhere on the web, including images, spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, even text files or entire databases (if they are available of course).
Web applications are also great for collecting information from your users. You can use inter-working and dynamic forms to collect exactly the desired information from them. Your web apps can then use this input to provide the best results for your users.
Storing Information
You can store your information in whichever format you need it in. This includes databases tables (MySQL, Access, etc.), spreadsheets, and text files.
Storing your information in database tables is most helpful when you are going to need to access the data programatically, either with your web application, or with other programs.
Storing information in spreadsheets is most helpful when you are looking to manually use or analyze data in programs like Microsoft Excel. It is less efficient for use with other programs, including your web application, since the data will need to be imported again whenever it needs to be used, as opposed to databases which store the data in a format readily usable by other programs.
Storing information in text files is most helpful when you are looking to store a large volume of information efficiently in a way that will take up as little space as possible. This is great for extracted text from websites or entire webpages.
Retrieving Information
You can also retrieve previously obtained information from your sources too.
Retrieving information from files or databases that you have worked with or added to previously is a relatively easy operation. Often, the easiest way is with databases, but you can also import stored data from a wide variety of formats, including Microsoft Office Files (Word, Excel, etc.), text files, and other sources.
Processing, Analysis, and Automation
You can perform whatever statistical or analytical analysis you need to. With web applications, you can do just about any sort of work that other programs can do. You can use server-side processing if you need work to be done that will be displayed on multiple browsers, multiple times, or need to be saved for later. You can use newer technologies like web workers to perform processing within a users browser too.
Presenting Information
Web applications allow you to present your information, or export it, in the best way for you or your users.
If you are presenting numerical information, you can use dynamic charts, tables, and graphs.
If you need to provide information to a wide range of users on different systems, you can present your results or interface in a PDF document, Excel spreadsheet, or within webpages.
If you are presenting collections of information, you can build a search-engine-like interface, presenting summaries of all of the available options, with further information available when users interact with the page.
Automation: combining it all together
By combining all of these components together, you can create a great way to automate your work.
Combining user inputs with processing and spreadsheets, you can automate the modification of your data; work that has taken our clients hours to perform is completed in mere minutes with a good web application.
By automatically downloading and processing information, then providing a intricate yet easy interface, you can provide abilities that your business couldn’t do without the web app. Whether that is: downloading and mapping weather data, comparing weather data with houses to get affected homes, or tracking and analyzing website themes to find the best one for websites, web applications with good interfaces can give your business the edge to save you time and money.
Let’s Get Started!
At Potent Pages, we have years of experience building web applications. We would be happy to work with you to automate your work for you using web applications. Our team has specialties in all of the components of building great web apps, from data collection, to processing, to export and presentation, as well as develop user interfaces. Please let us know what you’d like us to build for you (or what you don’t want to have to do any more), and we’d be happy to build you a web app specifically for your needs.
Looking for our assistance solving a problem? Have an idea that you want help bringing to life? Interested in learning more? Please send us a message and we will get back to you as soon as possible!