Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Testing Your Site

As you’ve no doubt realized by now, building a Web site involves quite a few steps. At any point in the process, you can easily 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 you could have 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. For a quick test, in the Document toolbar, click the Live View button (Live View) to see how a page looks and works. This way is great for quickly checking JavaScript and viewing complex CSS. However, since the built-in browser for this is WebKit (aka Apple’s Safari browser), Live View doesn’t necessarily show how your page will look in another Web browser such as Internet Explorer.

  To see how your layouts, CSS, and JavaScript hold up in other browsers, use Dreamweaver’s ...