Difference Between Web Application & Website

Website is a one way street of information, whereas a web application is much more dynamic and is heavily focused on the user’s end.

Lets discuss this in detail.

Website

We can view a website as something as simple as a brochure. Like a brochure, a website’s purpose is to inform and present itself to an audience on a specific subject. The content is consumed only by the user. Because websites function to disseminate content, the user doesn’t have much or any control in altering the content and it ultimately won’t affect the content when other users view that site. And by nature, a user request to retrieve information on a website will typically return archived and static content that’s already been produced.

We’ve seen how websites evolved over the years as they’ve been recently designed to look more like apps. Take amazon.com for example. Naturally, we’re used to calling it a website, but it’s functionality across the board has arguably the look and feel of an app as there’s a heavy emphasis on user input. This isn’t to take anything away from defining what a website is, but it’s something to recognize as many websites have been gravitating towards an app restructuring lately – even if it’s reformatting the site to be mobile friendly and responsive.

Web Application

Web applications have more emphasis on user interaction to achieve a specific task. A user’s web activity can affect the content that’s being presented to both the user and select others who view the web app. More specifically, the dynamic content / data generated or modified by the user will be able to result some output of content / data. At the end of the day, web applications can be seen as user-centric tools that can be fully customizable to their needs.

Web Application become a buzz word that’s now become part of our daily colloquial language, especially in the mobile world. The popularity of applications on the web has skyrocketed due to our yearning for more task-oriented apps. We like apps that helps us with productivity, collaboration, sharing, and adding cats when we’re editing our photos. Even in a workplace setting, work performance is measured by metrics and how quickly a task can be performed – the rise of web applications helps us do those things.