Dreamweaver CS5.5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Testing Your Site

As you’ve no doubt realized 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. Both small mistakes, like typos, and site-shattering errors, like broken links, occur frequently in the web development cycle.

Unfortunately, web designers often neglect to develop good procedures 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 developing a thorough strategy for regular testing. By that time, serious design errors may have so completely infested your 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 in Dreamweaver’s Document toolbar (The Document Window). This is a great way to quickly check JavaScript components and view complex CSS. However, since Dreamweaver’s built-in browser is WebKit (basically what you find in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers), Live View doesn’t necessarily show you how your page will look in another browser, like Internet Explorer.

  To see how your layouts, ...