Exit tutorial
 Web Design - Good and Bad Practice |
| Part Fifteen |
| Testing And Debugging In the real world of computer systems development, some consider testing to be the most important phase. In the world of the web, it doesn't seem to have the same importance. Look at the many web pages with glaring errors such as missing images and non-working links. If your web page editor has a spelling checker, use it. If it doesn't, find another way to check the spelling. Test your pages with several different browsers. You will be amazed at the variations in interpreting even the simplest HTML tags. Make sure you try your pages with the browsers provided by major online services such as AOL and Prodigy. You may also want to test with previous versions of the more popular browsers. Statistics might show that the current version accounts for 30%, with most of the remainder split between the two previous versions. You will be amazed at some of the differences between two successive versions of the same browser. Test all your pages after making even trivial changes to your site, just to make sure you haven't broken something. (Programmers know that you're far more likely to introduce an error when making changes than when the original work was done.) During development, you've probably done the testing of your site with all the files on the PC. Make sure you test the site after it's been moved to the server. Make sure that you test your pages in a way that forces the browser to get everything -- both text and images. This means turning off the caching, emptying the cache from within the browser, or deleting all the files in the browser's cache directory. This will force the browser to get everything from scratch. You'll see how long your pages really take to load. And while you're doing this, you can measure your browser's "hang time." This is how long the browser hangs there with a blank screen before something shows up. Now go to your browser's options dialog and make it so that the page always has a white background and the links are their default colours (blue and red). A lot of people will have their browsers set this way to avoid viewing weird backgrounds or strangely-coloured links. How does your page look with these settings? If you can get hold of one, test your site with one of those new widgets that turns your TV into an Internet surfboard. Most of these still have just the capabilities of the very early browsers. They have lower resolution than most browsers and they reformat the page so it can be read on a TV screen. Turn on the "don't load images" menu item, or checkbox in your browsers option settings. How does your page look without its images? Is it still possible to find your way around? If your page uses a text font that isn't one of the defaults, be sure that the page looks right with all the different variations mentioned here. If your page is blessed with a Java or JavaScript widget, what happens when you look at it with a browser that doesn't support Java. What about a Java-enabled browser with Java turned off ? If your page needs a special plug-in, or a special helper application, or uses a special file type, test to see what happens if one or more is missing or not supported. It might be enough to make Netscape toss its cookies. As mentioned previously, there are a number of things that you can put on your page that keep the little red "download" indicator from going out after the page has finished loading. If your page has one, see what happens with different browsers. You should consider replacing these widgets with something that doesn't keep the browser from functioning properly. Have other people test your web site. Especially if their computer setup is different from yours. Have other people proofread your text. Test on different platforms. In one case, a page that looked fine on a PC didn't fare as well on a Macintosh. And this was with the same version of the same browser. One source of problems is specifying a text font that's only available on a PC and forgetting to add the Mac equivalent. If you've got a site which has different versions, depending on the browser, you've really upped the ante, testing-wise. Last, but not least, don't forget to check your server's error log. It's the main error reporting and debugging tool for your site. Look for things like missing images, bad links, and errors from CGI scripts. You should check this log on a regular basis, and especially after making changes or additions to your site. Pay attention when someone tells you they had trouble viewing your site. For every person who takes the time and trouble to write to you, there are many more who will give up in frustration. Maintenance It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. The world changes, the web changes, and one day your site will have to be upgraded. Is your site easy to modify? Is it easy to make additions and changes? Some of the things that make a site difficult to change are sloppy formatting of HTML code, image maps, and a site where every page links to every other page. Can your site be maintained or modified by someone besides you? In the world of commercial web sites, it's more than likely your site will eventually be inherited by someone else. Have you left them a clear path to follow? If you use browser-dependent features on your site, you will have to have two or more versions of your pages -- a maintenance headache. Format your HTML documents so that they are easy to read. Use blank lines and spaces to separate elements. Create a set of uniform formats and styles for your pages so that you can create a new page by copying and modifying an existing page. If you have links to other sites ("My Mondo Cool Link List"), you owe it to your visitors to keep these links up-to-date and accurate. You should check them on a regular basis to change or modify links to sites that have moved, and to remove links that now lead to dead ends. Fortunately, there are a number of shareware tools that can aid in this process. If you move your site to another URL, make sure that you leave a forwarding address at the old URL. And make sure that your pages are current. If you have a sale, or a contest, or an offer that ends on May 25th, make sure that the page gets updated or removed within a few days of the expiration. Consider building high level tools to support and maintain your web site. One example would be a "gallery editor" with a graphical interface that lets you lay out galleries or catalogs by dragging images around, then automatically generates the HTML. There are also shareware utilities that let you make global changes to all the pages in a web site at one time. Consider using automated maintenance to build and maintain your HTML pages. |