Monday, May 07, 2007

Web Applications and your business

Web Applications... What? Programs, scripts, and other form of structured or object oriented lines of codes found in different types of websites have been around since over a decade ago...

In the advent of the internet... websites were displayed as text which had "hyperlinks" to other webpages and so forth and so on.. thus: the World Wide Web. But that's ancient history you may say... yes it is... But from such a jurrasic concept... Those people who have IQ's far higher than your weight in pounds saw the need of the web to do more than just display "static" text and hyperlinks...

HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language was the front runner of the web's steady rise... With HTML, one could show text and/or images on their websites. Fine! then came Javascripts, Visual Basic Scripts... These scripts enabled web designers to become web developers. Later on, ASP and PHP were introduced. With ASP matching up with Microsoft's database technolodies and PHP with MySQL(both open source).

So what does all of these common knowledge have anything to do with a business or a business person? Well think of having your own website with a login page that leads to your inventory and sales system.... such a system would enable you to check and update your inventory stocks and sell the remainder stocks to your clients. Such a system would entail a lot of programming but would be beneficial to you and would enable you to take your office on the road...

Imagine the same system that enables your sales people to post or book their sales from within and arrange for delivery to their clients, the same system deducts the items sold from your current inventory online-realtime-anytime... Imagine, again, utilizing the same system, and creating an interface designed specifically to be used as a POS or Point of Sales system...

Now what would it benefit you to go for such a system as against your manual system of managing your inventory, writing out sales slips and order forms, and selling in a retail environment.

  1. In running a business, whether retail, wholesale or services information is KING! We need to have the information we need, without the need to rely on anybody else.
  2. Let's just say that you had to go home because of an emergency and instead of going back to the office and prepare your sales reports and sales quotations, you could do these at home and if needed you could go straight to your client directly from home?
  3. With such Web Applications, your accounting and credit and collections departments would have all the information they need when they need it...

Web Applications are not limited to inventory and sales processes, some web applications function as CMS's or "Content Management Systems"... some as Blogs, such as this one, and some offer a repository of anything from audio to video to PDF files... Web applications can be in any form or presentation that you need them to be in order to work for you.

For those who need some affordable "Web Applications" programming please contact the author at alphonse.tan@gmail.com.