Everyone wants a custom app for their small business, but there’s not always the time or money needed to code one up from scratch. As most business owners are busy with the daily needs of of their business and don’t have time to take an advanced HTML class, Bizness Apps can help. They provide a series of functional components that can be easily plugged into an app and deployed using HTML5 and/or to the Apple App Store or Android Market.
I am often dubious of one-size-fits-all solutions, because they remind me of the heinous website templates of the early internet (geocities, anyone?). A time when anyone with some basic HTML knowledge felt justified in charging thousands of dollars for 5 minutes of mindless data entry, calling the result a “professional” website. However, Bizness Apps isn’t like this. Bizness Apps can leverage design skills to make something really attractive. A great option for design professionals who do not like to code, Bizness Apps offers a white-label solution that can be resold to clients. For instance, if your restaurant was one of the thousands who paid someone to build an all-Flash site that effectively hides your menu from a huge chunk of smartphones , Bizness Apps can fix that quickly.
Bizness Apps does make use of templates, but they aren’t like the website templates of the 90’s – instead, they’re just a starting point. Bizness Apps seems to know its market; they have templates for the types of small businesses who typically just need a simple feature set: restaurants, bars/clubs, law firms, real estate agents, gyms, radio stations, etc.
The list of features is impressive, and includes items like push notifications, GPS coupons, hit counters, galleries and more.They’re also adding e-commerce solutions from Volusion, Magento and Shopify which, if you’re looking to add purchases to your app, are pretty good solutions.
You can try Bizness Apps for free to see if it’s right for your business. If you like it, it’s $39 a month for an iPhone app. If you’d like to make that app for Android, iPad or in HTML5, you’re looking at an additional ten dollars per month for each platform. So, if you’re a law firm wanting to deploy to iPhone, iPad, Android and HTML5 that would cost you $69 per month…not too shabby.