Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Site Launch Checklist

Don’t wait until you finish your site before developing a thorough strategy for regular 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 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 it to is to preview it in as many browsers as possible. For a quick test, click the Live View button (Live View) in Dreamweaver’s Document toolbar. This is a great way to quickly check JavaScript components and view complex CSS. However, since Dreamweaver’s built-in browser is WebKit (a.k.a Apple’s Safari browser), Live View doesn’t necessarily show you how your page will look in another browser, like Internet Explorer.

  To see how your layouts, CSS, and JavaScript hold up elsewhere, use Dreamweaver’s Preview command (File→Preview in Browser) to test your pages in every browser you can get your hands on (Dreamweaver lists your installed browsers when you click Preview, and you select a browser from that list). Make sure the graphics look right, your layout remains intact, and Cascading Style Sheets and Dreamweaver behaviors work as you intended.

  For a thorough evaluation, however, you should preview your pages using every combination of browser and operating system you think your site’s visitors may use. At the very least, try to test your pages using Internet Explorer 6, ...