Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Test!

The final word in the dilemma of designing for a variety of browsers is test! Always test your site on as many browsers, browser versions, and platform configurations as you can get your hands on.

Professional web design firms run their sites through a vigorous quality assurance phase before going “live.” They generally keep a bank of computers of varying platforms and processing powers that run as many versions of browsers (including Lynx) as possible.

Another option is to subscribe to a screen capture service such as Browser Cam. For a monthly fee, you can enter the URL of a page you want to check, and Browser Cam creates screen captures of the page in all the operating systems and browsers you select. This makes it easy to see which browsers are having problems without needing to run copies of all of them yourself. Read more at http://browsercam.com.

If you have extremely limited resources, make the site available on a private test site and take a look at it on your friends’ computers. You might view it under corporate conditions (a fast Windows machine with a 6.0 browser and a T1 connection), and then visit a friend at home to see the same site on AOL with a 56K modem. (If nothing else, this is a good excuse to get away from your computer and visit your friends.)

Although your pages will certainly look different in different environments, the idea is to make sure that nothing is outright broken and your content is communicated clearly.