Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. 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 the pages of your site 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 will look and function the way you want it to is to preview it in as many Web browsers as possible. Use Dreamweaver’s Preview command (see Chapter 1) 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 advanced technologies like Cascading Style Sheets, Dreamweaver Behaviors, and layers work as intended.

  For a thorough evaluation, however, you should preview your pages using every combination of browser and operating system you think your site’s ...