Website or Web App? A Question We Hear Often in Kathmandu, Nepal

Working with businesses across Kathmandu, Nepal, we hear the terms website and web application used interchangeably far more often than they should be. A website is primarily about presenting information: pages, images, and text that a visitor reads. A web application is about letting a user do something: log in, manage data, complete a transaction, or interact with a system that changes based on their input.

A restaurant's page listing its menu and location is a website. An online food ordering system with a shopping cart, account login, and order history is a web application. Both can technically live on the same domain, but they require very different engineering effort, since a web app needs a database, user authentication, and business logic that a static website does not.

Knowing which one you actually need changes both the budget and the timeline. Businesses sometimes ask for a 'simple website' but describe features, like customer logins or booking management, that make it a web application in practice. Being clear about this upfront avoids scope surprises halfway through a project.