Is There Really An App for Everything?

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “There’s an App for Everything”. What does this mean and is it really true?

App stands for application which can mean a specially designed tool for online and mobile uses. Anyone can design an application and with the right marketing techniques and niche markets, convince people to start using their app. While some apps don’t make it beyond a small market share, others seem to be well known and loved. One thing to remember about Apps is that they are 3rd Party, which means they are made to work with a variety of online and mobile technologies, but are usually not associated with the brands they work with. It’s likely there is an app for almost everything, but we’ll help you make an informed decision.

There are three types of applications we commonly work with

1. Plug-Ins for WordPress
2. Online Hosted Applications
3. Mobile Applications

This article will focus on Plug-Ins for WordPress.

WordPress Plug-Ins are Applications

Here at Vivid Image we listen to our customers and work hard to find them solutions for their specific needs. This often involves using applications or plug-ins. These types of 3rd party applications can provide all kinds of functionality for a much lower investment than what was traditionally involved with creating custom functionality specifically for your site. While there can be trade-off’s – not getting all the features you would like to see – we find that a great majority of our clients are very happy with the use of these plugins. While we’re happy to help you find an application for your needs, we always try to be selective which Plug-in’s we use on your site. This is important because 3rd party applications need to perform as expected and always carry the risk of unexpectedly going away. When selecting a plug-in, we look for these key factors:

1. Reputation of the plug-in and its creator
2. How long the plug-in has been around
3. If the plug-in has a proven track record of upgrades

One of the many plug-ins for WordPress we routinely use is a tool called Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is the functionality that we use to create those great “fill in the blank” forms on a website. Gravity Forms is an easy to use tool that we not only create your initial forms with, but you have the ability to use the tool yourself to create future forms! In the past, any time a form needed updating, our custom programmers would need to be involved. Using Gravity Forms not only saves you time by being able to make form modifications’ on your schedule, but it saves you money!

A couple of additional articles about applications to manage your social media sites and applications for your mobile devices are coming soon! Subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss out.

Disclaimer: 3rd party software and applications are not a built in functionality of the programs and technologies that are designed to integrate with like WordPress, and Vivid Image is not responsible for, nor do we have any control over any changes made to applications by their creators. The functions within each application are those of the creator and Vivid Image support may be unable to answer/troubleshoot issues.