Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

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 that 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 View button in Dreamweaver’s Document toolbar (Phase 5: Preview Your Work). This is a great way to quickly check JavaScript components and view the way a browser displays pages with complex CSS. However, since Dreamweaver’s built-in browser is WebKit (basically what you find in Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari browser, and the web browser in many mobile phones), Live view doesn’t necessarily show you how your page will look in other popular browsers, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera.

  To see how your layouts, CSS, and JavaScript features 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 one from the list). Make sure the graphics look right, your layout remains intact, and Cascading Style Sheets and Dreamweaver behaviors work as you intend.

  For a thorough evaluation, however, ...