Web Application Development

Do you need a web application or a website?

A website presents information. Visitors read about your services, look at your work, and get in touch. WordPress handles this well, and for most businesses it is the right tool — I say that as someone who builds WordPress sites for a living.

A web application does work. Users sign in, create and manage data, and move through processes specific to your business. When that is the requirement, stretching WordPress with plugins produces something fragile; purpose-built code produces something that lasts.

The signs below mean an application is the right call. If none of them apply, tell me — I will recommend a WordPress build instead, because it will cost less and ship sooner. I build both, so the recommendation follows your requirements, not my pitch.

• Users need accounts, and different users should see different things
• Your product stores and works with data per user — records, files, projects, orders in progress
• There is a workflow: statuses, approvals, handoffs between people
• You need live, two-way integration with other systems, not just a contact form
• The software itself is the product you plan to sell — a SaaS

What I build

Most custom application work falls into a few recognizable shapes: internal dashboards, client-facing portals, custom functionality bolted onto an existing site, and products meant to be sold as software.

Integrations are usually the hidden half of the project. An application rarely lives alone — it takes payments, syncs with a CRM, pulls inventory, or pushes notifications. I design the integration layer early, because the third-party APIs you depend on define what the application can promise its users.

• Internal dashboards — one screen for data currently spread across spreadsheets and separate tools
• Client and staff portals — accounts, permissions, documents, and status visible to the right people only
• Custom functionality added to an existing website — calculators, booking logic, member areas
• API integrations — payments, CRMs, shipping, accounting, and internal systems
• AI-based SaaS products — full builds from interface to model integration to deployment

The stack: Next.js, Node.js, and code you own

Next.js handles the frontend. Its server rendering means public pages — landing pages, docs, pricing — arrive as real HTML, which is what fast load times and search indexing both require. Node.js runs the APIs behind them. Where a project extends an existing WordPress site, I work in PHP instead of forcing a rewrite.

I write code the next developer can read. Plain structure, consistent naming, and documentation that explains why things are built the way they are. You own the repository from day one.

The habits from my SEO work carry over here. Public pages get clean markup, structured data, and Core Web Vitals treated as pass-or-fail requirements — because a SaaS product still needs its marketing pages to be found.

AI-based SaaS products

An AI-based SaaS product is one where a model does part of the work: drafting content, classifying records, extracting data from documents, or answering questions against your own material. I build these using established AI models through their APIs rather than training models from scratch, which keeps costs predictable and quality dependable.

The model is one component. The product is everything around it: how user input reaches the model, what happens when the model returns something wrong, how usage is metered so API costs do not run away, and how user data is kept out of places it should not go. That engineering is what separates a working product from a demo.

Deployment on infrastructure I manage

A website can survive on shared hosting. An application cannot — it is a running process with a database, background jobs, and user data that must not be lost. I deploy applications to VPS servers I configure end to end: DNS, SSL/TLS, firewall and WAF rules, security hardening, and automated backups.

This is the same infrastructure work I do daily in my current roles, not a task I subcontract. When something breaks at the server level, the person who built the application is the same person who built the server, so diagnosis is faster because there is no handoff.