Part 5: Your Online Presence: Your Company’s Web Application

This is part 5 in our 6 part series—Your Online Presence. This is series of guest posts for Carrera & Company.

This installment of our series covering your Online Presence is a little more specialized that our other articles. You can previous topics here:

• Your Website
• Your Social Media Strategy
• Free & Local Ways to Promote Yourself Online

This article looks at your company’s web application. What is a web application? It’s a way for your customers to interact with your data—usually through some kid of a form input that will greatly effect the output. Sometimes your web application will be something small that helps reinforce your product or services, sometimes your web application IS your product or service.

Support Application

A good example of a web application that reinforces your product or services is a services calculator-for instance if you are a lawyer and want to help your clients calculate child support payments you could have a calculator that allows your client to input the mother’s salary, father’s salary and number of children.

Your web application then runs the equation in real time to show how much is due.

Another good example of a support application is to help show your customers the return on investment (ROI) on using your product – for instance if you have time tracking software and you know that someone billing $150/hour will recoup your $50/month price tag in 6 weeks, you can have a web application that allows them to put in their hourly rate, choose which plan they want to use (in this case the $50/month plan) and show them how long until they realize a break even ROI and how long until your product is actually producing more money for them than they are paying to use it.

Web Application as a Product or Service

(also known as software-as-a-service—SAAS)

An example of your web application being your product is if you offer a way for people who are working out with a physical trainer to do prescribed workouts and record them when they aren’t with their trainer. Not only does this product allow the client to keep track of their goals, it also allows them to save money by only working a trainer in person some times, but still get the benefits of a customized workout. You take this application and you sell it to a gym, making your web application a product a gym buys to offer their clients a new service.

Join us next month as we look at keeping your organization organized with Your Company’s Intranet.  If you missed the any article in this series you can see it here: Your Online Presence

For questions, comments or to work with us to create a web application for your company please contact Sawaya Consulting. SAWAYA Consulting is a strategic business-to-business partner focusing on information management through design & technology. We build corporate tools, informational websites, and web applications. We are located in Salt Lake City, Utah and online at www.sawayaconsulting.com.