Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Testing Your Site

As you’ve no doubt realized by now, there are quite a few steps involved in building a Web site. At any point in the process, it’s easy to introduce errors that affect the performance of your pages. Both small mistakes, like typos, and site-shattering errors, like broken links, occur frequently in the Web development cycle.

Unfortunately, Web designers often don’t develop a good procedure for testing their sites. This chapter offers some helpful techniques for testing your site, including using Dreamweaver’s wide array of site-testing tools.

Site Launch Checklist

Don’t wait until you’ve finished your site before embarking on a thorough strategy of testing. By that time, serious design errors may have so completely infested your site’s pages that you may have to start over, or at least spend many hours fixing problems that could have been prevented early on.

• Preview early and often. The single best way to make sure a page looks and functions the way you want is to preview it in as many Web browsers as possible. Use Dreamweaver’s Preview command (see Phase 5: Preview Your Work) to preview your page in every browser you can get your hands on. Make sure the graphics look right, that your layout remains the same, and that Cascading Style Sheets, Dreamweaver behaviors, and complex layout methods work as you intended.

  Note

  If you don’t have every browser ever created installed on your Mac, Windows, and Linux machines (you do have all three, don’t you?), consider ...