The fact of the matter is that we're not sure our target audience relates to the term "application development" whereas "web development" is fairly well understood. If our audience doesn't use the term, they're probably not searching for it, and so by switching to "web development" we hope to rank higher for those keywords, get more traffic, get more business, etc.

This might bring up the question of why we called it "application development" to begin with, and I'm afraid the answer isn't a very good one. I think it's because I thought it would be awkward to have "web development" right above "web design" or something like that, but now that doesn't make sense to me so I'm not sure what I was thinking. But let's just put this episode behind us. It's now "web development" and that's all you need to know.

UPDATE: As of October 2007 we're not doing custom web programming anymore. We still do web design and building out sites, but only static sites without database interaction, except in rare exceptions.