Have you ever experienced that you were looking for an app to fulfil a specific task but could not find anything? This is what happened to us when we were organizing a blind wine tasting event in our apartment. Since we are living in the ICT-WG, we wanted to rate the wines digitally, but there were no apps, web-apps or websites with the specific features available.
So we decided to build our own wine tasting app prototype using WordPress. A WordPress website is platform independent and also needs the least design effort. We took a responsive template that came closest to our concept and extended it with a rating plugin. Within an hour we had our blind wine tasting website. We then spent two hours additionally to get the design close to perfection 
The ICT-WG Wine Tasting Website
For each wine we were about to taste, we created a blog post. Each post consists of a rating section at top and a comment section at the bottom. The rating section differentiates between “nose” (aroma in the glass), “tongue” (taste) and “finish” (aftertaste). On the main page, the posts are arranged in a grid and give an overview of the intermediate results. The names of the wines, that can be seen in the screenshots below, were added after the wine tasting evening.
Web-apps
If the website is based on HTML5 and CSS3, it can easily be converted to a web-app in a few steps. A web-app serves as an alternative for apps with little content. It can be quickly implemented, is platform independent and can be immediately published without any app-stores. Drawbacks of a web-app are the worse performance, the need for constant internet connectivity and the limited access to operating system features.
Conclusion
A responsive website serves as a good starting point to test an app idea. If the target is a web-app, the website can be quickly converted adapting minor parts of the code. If the target is a native-app, the website serves as a prototype to try out the design and the features of the app.
Visit our wine tasting website: http://winetasting.ozaehner.ch/wines/