Testing and Validating Your Web Pages

One of the biggest problems with the internet it the wide array of browsers and devices that your site can be viewed on.  A website that looks lovely on your browser can look bad (very bad) on a different browser.  Some of the problems you can see as you move from browser to browser may include having elements on your page overlap or having content wrap strangely.  Both of these flaws can make your site difficult to use or could even hide some critical parts of you page making your site difficult to navigate.

On of the first things you can test is that your web pages are validly constructed.  Having pages that are validly constructed helps improve the odds that your page will display correctly.  Unfortunately, just because they validate doesn't mean they will look good in different web browsers. Here are tools to test the appearance and validate the code.

• CSE HTML Validator Lite They bill it as "...the most powerful, easy to use, and user configurable HTML, XHTML, CSS, link, spelling, and accessibility checker available for Microsoft Windows."  It's free, but it's fairly limited. If you're a serious designer, you should at least get the standard version (at $69).
• BrowserCam It's not free and it's only cheap if you use it for one month to check out your site (if it takes longer than that...).
• LynxViewer is a service that allows web authors to see what their pages will look like (sort of) when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser.

Using these tools can help you insure that your website looks good in a variety of browsers on a variety of platforms. It is the first step in an effective website testing program.  Other things to test include usability testing, accessibility testing and content testing.  I will discuss these types of testing in future blog posts.

Labels: testing, tools, website tips