Don’t Forget to Test
Author of this post: Jonathan Nicol | About Blog Authors »
Opera Small Screen Rendering
Mockups, HTML templates, databasing, content management, hosting - there’s a lot to consider when developing a website. In the rush to put a site live on time and under budget, one important aspect of the process is often woefully neglected: testing. Sure, debugging a website isn’t most people’s idea of fun, but early testing and bug detection can save you a costly redesign later on. A thoroughly tested website also makes a great marketing tool. It speaks volumes about your level of professionalism, and will keep your clients coming back for more.
In a nutshell, testing a website means using the site under a broad range of conditions, and seeing if any gremlins come out of the woodwork. Is the site still functional with JavaScript turned off? Does it break if the user doesn’t have the latest Flash plugin installed? Will your layout hold up as well in Internet Explorer as it does in Firefox? What about on a Mac? Or a PC? Does the site scale well at different browser resolutions?
Before you start testing (in fact, before you even start building a site) it is important to establish a set of ‘baseline’ testing requirements. For instance, I no longer test sites in Internet Explorer 5. The user base of the IE5 suite is now less than 1%, and I consider it a poor use of my time to optimize my sites for such a miniscule audience. The baseline you settle on should be tailored to your site’s target audience, but if you want to get a feel for global browsing trends the statistics provided by The Counter are a great resource.
Once you’ve decided which devices and platforms to test on, there are a number of free tools to help ease the testing workload. Some of these have been covered on this blog before, but here are a few more:
Virtual PC IE6 image: Microsoft offer a free Virtual PC image of Windows XP running IE6, allowing your to run IE6 and 7 on the same machine.
Standalone legacy IE versions: Tredosoft offer an installer for multiple standalone versions of IE, though unfortunately it doesn’t work in Vista yet.
The web developer extension: This Firefox add-on makes it a snap to test your site at various screen resolutions, or with JavaScript and CSS turned off.
Opera small screen rendering: Built right into Opera is the ability to see how your site will look in mobile devices running Opera Mini.
The level of testing you commit to will be dependant on a range of factors. The important thing is to factor testing into your web development projects from the outset, not as an afterthought.
