Website, portal or web app: what do you actually need?

It usually starts with a sentence in a meeting. “Customers should be able to log in.” “Can we have a calculator?” “We need an app for that.”

Then you ask three agencies and get three quotes that can’t be compared, because each one heard something different. The web application vs website question isn’t really about technology. It’s about what people need to do when they get there.

Web application vs website: what each one is

A website shows people things. A web application lets them do things.

• Website. Pages people read: who you are, what you do, why to choose you, how to get in touch. Everyone sees the same thing.
• Portal. A website with a locked door. A known person logs in and sees what’s theirs: their documents, orders, bookings or account.
• Web app. A tool people use to get a job done: book, search, configure, calculate, submit. It might sit inside your website or stand on its own.

Most businesses need a bit of each. A simple test: if someone has to be logged in for it to make sense, it’s an application.

Signs you need more than a website

If a person is doing the job the website should be doing, you’ve outgrown pages.

• Your team answers the same questions all day: where’s my order, what’s free, how much would it cost.
• Customers email documents back and forth that could sit behind a login.
• Someone copies information from your systems onto the website by hand.
• A spreadsheet runs part of the business, and only one person understands it.

That last one comes up more than any other. I often say that if it exists in a spreadsheet, we can build it. More on that in if it lives in a spreadsheet, there’s a better way.

What getting it wrong costs

Buy too little and you live with workarounds. Buy too much and you pay for logins nobody uses.

• Plugins bolted on to fill the gap. The website gets stretched to do a job it wasn’t built for, and everyone’s scared to update it.
• Quotes you can’t compare. One agency prices a website, another prices an app, and you can’t tell which one heard you right.
• A portal nobody logs into. Built because it sounded right, not because customers needed it.
• The person in the middle. Holding it all together by hand. When they’re off, it stops.

What doesn’t fix it

The word people use for what they want is rarely the thing they need.

“We need an app.” Usually you need one job done well. That might be a page, a form or a tool on the site you already have.

“There’ll be a plugin for it.” Sometimes. Plugins bodged together for a complex job are how websites end up too fragile to touch.

“Let’s get AI to build it.” You’ll get what you described, not what you needed. More on that in should you build your own software?

“Go with the cheapest quote.” If the quotes are for different things, the cheapest is just the one that heard the least.

Portals, calculators and logins

Most B2B firms need something in the middle: a website that does one or two useful things.

• Calculators and configurators. The interactive thing that answers the buyer’s question before they’ll get in touch.
• Client and member portals. Log in, see the thing that’s yours, do the thing you came to do.
• Live bookings, stock and pricing. Pulled from the system that already owns it, so there’s one version and it’s the right one.
• Connections to your CRM. Enquiries land where sales actually work. More in can your website talk to your CRM?

At the bigger end is a tool people run part of their working day in. Governor Space is one: a single platform, assembled from the systems the client already ran on. 500 schools were onboarded in 48 hours, and it’s still in daily use, nine years after we built it in 2017.

What changes in cost and timescale

Every step from pages to tools adds decisions, and decisions are what you pay for.

A website is the simplest. A portal adds logins, permissions and the question of who sees what. A web app adds the logic of the job itself, and usually connections to other systems. Each step means more to decide, design, build and test.

That’s why web applications are quoted per project. A listings feed that fills itself is a different job from a member portal with logins and permissions. We can tell you roughly which end of the range you’re at before anyone writes a specification.

If all you need is pages, copy and images done well, that’s web design, and it costs less. We’ll say so.

Four things to settle before you talk to anyone

Answer these and every quote you get will be for the same thing.

• Who is it for? Prospects, customers, members or your own team. Each needs something different.
• What do they need to do? Read, find, log in, book, calculate. The verb tells you what you’re buying.
• Where does the information live now? Which system owns it, and who keeps it up to date.
• What happens today if it isn’t there? If the answer is “someone does it by hand”, that’s the job.

The website brief template helps you write it down.

How we help you decide

We start with what people need to do, then build the smallest thing that does it.

Our web applications and integrations service, quoted per project, designs tools the way we design websites, around the people using them. If what it should do isn’t settled yet, a one-day strategy workshop, from £2,800 + VAT, settles it first.

• The right size. We’ll tell you if a website will do, and we’ll tell you early if something can’t be done.
• Built against your systems. Replacing what you run on is a last resort, not the opening suggestion.
• Designed to be used. Around the people using it, so it’s still in use years later.
• You own it. Documented, handed over, no lock-in.