Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. Testing Your Site

As you no doubt realize by now, building a website involves quite a few steps. At any point in the process, you can easily introduce errors that affect the performance of your pages. Mistakes both small (like typos) and site-shattering (think broken links) occur frequently in the web development cycle.

Unfortunately, web designers often neglect to develop a set of best practices for testing their sites. This chapter offers helpful techniques for testing your site, and shows you how Dreamweaver’s wide array of site-testing tools can help.

Site Launch Checklist

Don’t wait until you finish your site before you develop a thorough strategy for regular testing. If you do, serious design errors may have so completely infested your pages that you have to start over, or at least spend many hours fixing problems you could have prevented early on. These guidelines help you avoid such a predicament:

• Preview early and often. The single best way to make sure a page looks and functions the way you want it to is to preview it in as many browsers as possible. For a quick test, click the Live button in Dreamweaver’s Document toolbar (Phase 5: Preview Your Work). This is a great way to quickly check JavaScript components, web fonts, and the way a browser displays pages with complex CSS. You see pages as your web visitors will see them in the Google Chrome web browser, because Live view uses the same rendering engine. Your page will look similar in Safari and many mobile browsers. ...