Things to Note When You Are Converting Your Website into an App
Many traditionalists didn’t bother turning their websites to apps until now. With the help of web application development, it felt like why would anyone want a dedicated app if the same experience is offered without wasting any device’s storage? The argument had a point from the user’s point of view. But from a business point of view, renting a browser’s capabilities to showcase your business has a lot of limitations.
This is where apps win – having the possibility to offer unlimited features at your own infrastructure. The obvious difference in the user experience is the speed of the app which is affected by cloud space used by a browser against local space used by an app.
Things You Carry Forward From Your Website to Your App
When you are adding a new layer of business, revenue or customer acquisition in the form of an app, there are few things that you just cannot mess around with. It has to be a fine balance between uniformity and customization. Here are some things that you must carry forward to your app from your website.
Colors
There is no way you should be changing even the hexadecimal codes of your color coding in your new app. The colors that you introduced to your website must have had a meaning to it and must be adding to your brand value. It only makes sense to continue pushing the same brand value and image to the consumers even on an app.
Infographics
One of the most important things in your digital presence is your data. You must maintain continuity between data on your website and data on your app. For instance the product or service information has to be exactly the same on both platforms. The images or other multimedia you use on the website has to be the same on the app as well. Apart from product or service information, things like contact information & company information have to be the same across both platforms.
Core Features
If you have a dynamic website, you are most probably offering some features to the users. If it is an eCommerce website, you are offering core online retail features. If it’s a blogging platform, you are probably offering membership features. If it’s a multimedia streaming or delivery platform, you are probably offering user profiles and a lot more. Social media apps may want to keep their graphics consistent. There is a fine line between custom iOS app development and preserving the core user experience. These core features have to remain uniform across both your website as well as app.
New Things You Can Introduce in Your App
After respecting the uniformity across the platforms, you can think about innovating. There are some features on an app that are powered by the device’s capabilities. There are also some features that are limited in a browser. Here are a few things that you can look to expand upon when you convert your website into an app.
UX/UI
The overall user experience and interface is obviously going to be different since the point of contact is going to be scrolls and taps through fingers or pens instead of a traditional mouse. The aspect ratio of screens is also going to change according to the devices. This will result in your infographics displayed in a certain way. You will have to rethink about placing the content altogether keeping the uniformity active. The overall flow of the app might also alter compared to the website.
Notifications
A key advantage of having an app over a browser enabled experience is the ability to offer customized notifications to the users. This is a device’s ability to send push notifications in terms of short content that may include small sized imagery and brief textual information as well. This is a very effective feature that if optimized, can change the way users engage with your app.
APIs
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are interfaces of a functionality developed by another platform that you can borrow. For instance, Apple & Google both do the best navigation. To use Apple’s own navigation system, your app can borrow its interface and put a small pop-up like window in your app for the navigation functionality. You can use other application interfaces like payments, tracking, weather, etc.
Offline Mode
An app stores a lot of information about it locally. You may get concerned about the storage it keeps expanding on your device but it all gets worse when your app displays vital information without any internet connection. The offline mode is very popular among apps. You can fetch information in real time and store locally on a temporary basis like the navigation apps do. You can also permanently store some functionalities and information about your app on the device which will enable the users to access them without any internet.
Apps are very different in their behavior to the websites. There are advantages like convenience and intuitiveness for using an app over a website. There are also disadvantages like storage and limited aspect ratios when you compare them to websites. Ideally, businesses should focus on enhancing experiences on both and lately, many businesses have made the transition ideal.
Conclusion
Having an app is no more an added alternative. It is as much a necessity as anything else in your business. Revenue streams are redefined post the evolution of smartphones and smart connectivity. With connectivity infrastructure improving by every passing day and with manufacturers enhancing the devices to the next level, it is very likely that the mobile app revenues are going to soar high in the coming years. To offer the best user experience to ensure conversion of leads to business, you must maintain a fine balance between uniformity in design and innovation with the help of device features for your apps.
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