Tips for designing a robust web application

Most web applications fail due to poor preparation, not bad code. That’s because most problems arise right at the start: due to unclear requirements, a lack of understanding the user, underestimated complexity, or poor communication among the teams involved.

From our project experience, we know that good architecture is a collaborative process, especially for business-critical web applications. Development, design, DevOps, and client teams must ask the right questions early on, challenge assumptions, and make decisions that will remain viable in the future.

In this article, you’ll find 9 questions you should consider when planning a web application.

The most important tips for software planning are to clarify requirements, reduce complexity, communicate early on, evaluate user feedback, and consider maintainability from the very beginning. Anyone looking to develop a web application should view these points as part of a cohesive process.

Key tips at a glance:

1. Understand and question requirements:
   Not every desired feature is automatically useful. Good architecture evaluates benefits, effort, and risks.
2. Structure the architecture, but keep it simple:
   Diagrams, data models, and clear access rules help, as long as they don’t lead to unnecessary complexity.
3. Time communication correctly:
   Development, design, DevOps, and customer teams must discuss the right topics at the right time.
4. Take user feedback seriously, but filter it:
   Feedback highlights problems. The best solution must still be evaluated from both a business and technical perspective.
5. Plan for maintainability early on:
   A good web application remains stable even when new requirements arise.

These points are particularly crucial for software that is relevant to a company’s core business, because the software helps determine the value of the entire company.

A web application is well-planned if it follows a clear concept, is structured in a way that makes technical sense, and has been technically planned so that it can be expanded over the long term. You can tell early in the project whether it has a clear direction.

Clarify questions such as:

• What problem is the application intended to solve?
• Who is the application being developed for?
• Which processes are particularly important for the core business?
• Which requirements are relevant today, and which ones might be added later?
• What technical and organizational constraints exist?

While technical implementation is important, it only works well if there is a clear understanding beforehand of what needs to be built, which problems need to be solved, and which user groups exist.

This is particularly crucial for business-critical software: If a web application supports a company’s core processes, it must be reliable, transparent, and adaptable.

From a developer’s perspective, a well-conceived design is also evident when requirements are actively questioned. An idea may sound logical from the client’s perspective, but it can raise new questions during implementation. In such cases, it is important for developers to provide feedback, highlight risks, and explain the potential consequences of certain decisions.

Clear requirements prevent the effort, costs, and complexity of software development from being underestimated. One of the most common mistakes in the early design phase is assuming that features will be easier to implement than they actually turn out to be later.

This happens quickly: A feature may sound manageable at first, but has many dependencies in the background. If this isn’t recognized early enough, a web application can become significantly more expensive or complicated than planned.

Typical risks associated with unclear software requirements include:

• Features are conceived as too large or too complex.
• Client teams communicate requirements differently internally.
• Technical dependencies become apparent too late.
• The budget and timeline do not match the desired scope.
• Features are built that are rarely used later.

For software architecture, this means: Requirements must be evaluated collaboratively. What is truly necessary? What is essential for the business? What can come later? And what causes more effort than benefit? Clarifying these questions lays the foundation for a functional architecture.

The architecture of a web application should be planned in such a way that it clearly structures the business requirements without making them unnecessarily complicated. It is based on a clear understanding of the data, roles, and processes the application requires.

In practice, simple but effective questions help with this:

• What content must users be able to edit?
• What content is only delivered or displayed?
• Who is allowed to access which data?
• Which processes run automatically?
• What data needs to be stored, migrated, or synchronized?
• Which parts of the application are critical to its operation?

To answer these questions, development teams often work with diagrams, database schemas, or process sketches. This groundwork isn’t always immediately visible to customers, but it’s crucial for a stable web application. It translates business requirements into technical structures.

It’s important to note that architecture shouldn’t be overengineered. Overengineering is a real risk; building for hypothetical requirements that may never arise leads to unnecessary costs and long-term complexity.

A high-quality web application differs from one that merely works in that it efficiently helps users achieve their goals, makes economic sense, and remains scalable in the long term. An application can function technically correctly and still be risky if it is slow, difficult to use, or expensive to expand.

A good web application therefore meets several criteria at once:

• Users quickly understand what they need to do.
• The application loads quickly and responds reliably.
• Processes are consistent and transparent.
• The technical implementation matches the actual benefits.
• New requirements can be implemented without disproportionately high costs.
• Operation, monitoring, and maintenance are taken into account.

These criteria are particularly important for business-critical software. When a web application supports core operations, such as customer processes, internal workflows, data processing, or billing, poor design decisions have a direct impact on the business. Even minor errors, slow processes, or structures that are difficult to maintain cost time, but above all, they also create operational risks.

Many problems in software projects arise from poor timing, a lack of understanding, or unclear coordination. Especially when approaching a web application, development, design, DevOps, and the client team must collaborate early on.

Typical examples that lead to problems:

• DevOps is brought in too late, even though infrastructure issues are relevant early on.
• Design develops solutions that are technically feasible only with significant effort.
• Development chooses the simplest technical approach, which is not ideal from a UX perspective.
• Client teams pass on requirements that have been interpreted differently internally.

Effective collaboration between development, design, and DevOps therefore requires a basic mutual understanding. Developers don’t have to become designers, and designers don’t have to code. But everyone involved should understand the perspective that the other roles contribute.

Good communication is therefore an essential cornerstone of a successful software project. Clear responsibilities, early feedback, and joint prioritization are extremely important to ensure that the planned solution can be implemented optimally.

User feedback reveals whether a web application is truly intuitive and helpful in everyday use. At the same time, feedback should be evaluated from a professional and technical perspective and not simply implemented without filtering.

Users often know exactly where they’re having problems. However, they don’t always know which solution is best or what is technically feasible. That’s why it’s important to distinguish between the problem and the proposed solution.

It is therefore the developers' responsibility to take users' wishes into account, but also to recognize when there is a new, more efficient way of doing things.

When it comes to web applications, data migration, legacy issues, operations, and future flexibility are often underestimated. These issues tend to be less noticeable during the initial planning phase but can lead to significant effort later.

A typical example is legacy data. When old data needs to be transferred from an existing system into the new application, it initially sounds like a routine technical task. In practice, however, it is often much more complicated.

Reasons for this include, for example:

• Old, inconsistent data structures
• Historically varying use of required fields
• Data quality is worse than expected
• Customer teams are no longer aware of special cases in the system
• A lack of clear documentation of legacy processes

Such legacy issues can create significant problems later if they are not considered in the design.

That is why you should clarify early on:

• What existing systems are in place?
• What data needs to be transferred?
• Which data is business-critical?
• What special cases are known?
• Who can evaluate the data from a technical perspective?
• How will the migration be tested?

A web application remains maintainable if all of the above points have been taken into account: it must be structured simply enough, have clear responsibilities, and allow for future changes without disproportionate effort. Maintainability, therefore, results from deliberate decisions made during architecture and development.

If every new requirement becomes very expensive, the original implementation may not have been sufficiently prepared for change. A good web application doesn’t need to anticipate every future scenario, but it should allow for changes without requiring a fundamental overhaul of the system every time a new request arises.

This is particularly evident in long-term client projects. Requirements continue to evolve. Clients learn what they really need once the system is live. Markets change. External events can shift priorities. A maintainable web application can respond to these changes.

A good web application is created by integrating business objectives, user needs, technical architecture, and long-term maintainability from the very beginning. At least, that’s the formula we use at makandra to build web applications that have lasted for over 10 years. That’s not going to change anytime soon – quite the opposite. The more AI takes over more of the coding process, the more important it becomes to set the right framework, for web applications that people enjoy working with and that employees are happy to continue developing.