Build a Browser-Friendly Website

Complete an exhaustive soak test to minimise any niggling browser problems your site may experience when going live.

Building a great website is tough, but finishing the code and layout is only half the story. Too many sites have problems after going live because they weren’t tested properly first. Lots of things can and do go wrong, from poorly formatted code that some browsers choke on, to pages that break when opened on other platforms. If you developed your site on a Mac, what guarantee do you have that it’ll look the same on a PC, for example?

Your site is a prism for browser light. Make sure it's not a flawed one.

Even now, when HTML structures are likely to be served as part of a CMS template system, it’s important that all the basics are in place. You need a soak test: a checklist of crucial areas that you can test are working before the site goes live. That’s exactly what we’ve put together here. Follow our tips and your site will be as problem-free as possible.

Clean up your code

Clean, glitch-free code with no stray tags or unclosed comments looks better, is easier to edit and is less likely to spring surprises on you when your site goes live. WYSIWYG web authoring tools already include features for tidying up your code. Let’s face it – some of us really need them. Dreamweaver will even format and indent your HTML following your configuration guidelines. Go to ‘Commands | Clean Up HTML’ or ‘Clean Up XHTML’.
We prefer to run static code through HTML Tidy, which is available as a stand-alone program from http://tidy.sourceforge.net/#binaries, or as a plug-in for manual code-editing tool NoteTab Light. The software deletes stray tags, adds any missing tag elements and completes open tags for you.

Meet HTML standards

Compliance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards makes your sites more accessible and usable, and also helps them to perform well on multiple platforms. You can see whether your site is compliant with XHTML and CSS standards by using W3C’s online validation tools. You’ll find the main testing page at http://validator.w3.org. This gives you a full breakdown of all the syntax and code errors in any page submitted. You can then update your code in accordance with the guidelines. Don’t be disheartened if your site fails. Some of the web’s biggest sites have XHTML errors according to the validator, including Google and Microsoft’s homepages.

There are numerous tools online that will validate your site for compliance with the relevant standards.

To use the W3C’s validation tool, go to http://validator.w3.org and enter the URL of the web page you wish to test. You can also upload code from a local machine or paste HTML mark-up into the Direct Input box. The validator can only check one page at a time.

Meet CSS standards

There’s a second service available to help you check and correct CSS scripts. It can be found at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator. Again, you can point the validator to a version of the file you wish to check online, upload the code or paste it directly into a box.
The errors returned come with detailed explanations of how you can fix them. The validator will identify even the smallest of problems, including missing line terminators and brackets.

Enable resizing

Remember the early days of the web, when sites came with front-page disclaimers such as 'Optimised for Internet Explorer at a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels'? How we groaned. Don't forget that people are viewing your site on different platforms, with different display settings and monitor resolutions. Enabling your page to resize to any browser means that it will work better on multiple platforms, from desktop machines to handheld devices. The key is to use percentage sizes when creating

layers rather than specifying fixed sizes. It’s a tough habit to get into, especially if you’ve become used to creating exactly positioned layouts.

Resizer is essential for testing the flexibility of your site's design.

First, check that your site looks good on the largest monitor size your setup can muster, then work backwards – down to 800 x 600 pixels. Right-click your Windows desktop and choose ‘Properties’. Click ‘Settings’ and you’ll be able to change your default desktop resolution using a slider. If you use Vista, choose ‘Personalise’ from the contextual menu instead. It’s even easier in Windows 7 – there should be a right-click menu item labelled ‘Screen Resolution’. Some video card control panels let you do this without venturing into Windows’ display settings.

Test on all browsers

It’s important to make sure that pages look the same in the big five browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Fire up your site in each of these and make a careful comparison. Here’s a quick tip: if you have two browsers open showing the same page, right-click on an empty part of the Windows taskbar and choose ‘Tile windows horizontally’ (or ‘Show windows side by side’ on Windows 7). This makes it easier to spot differences.
Five browsers on one system may seem like overload, but there are ways to cut that down. If you’re a Firefox user, you can install IE Tab, a plug-in that enables you to view pages using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. There’s also Chrome View, which renders pages in Firefox using Google Chrome. In short, get Firefox.

Test on Macs and PCs

Your pages should look the same on Macs as they do on PCs running Windows, whether you have access to one or not. The best method is to borrow a Mac to test your site. If you’re developing for a professional audience, you can employ the services of Browsercam instead.

The Litmus test. Run your site through actual browsers on actual operating systems. For a price...

Litmus uses a bank of testing machines running multiple browsers on all the main OSes. For a subscription fee of $49 (£30) a month, it lets you test an unlimited number of web pages. You enter your site’s URL and receive screenshots as it appears on Macs and Windows systems running any of 24 web browsers. Most of the important ones are included, with different iterations of Firefox, IE and Chrome on Windows, and Safari and Camino on the Mac. The only current important omission we can spot is the Mac version of Chrome. $39 (£24) buys you a 14-day ‘project pass’, which is a good choice if you only have a single site to test.

Testing for free

These are trying financial times for most of us, so here are a couple of free solutions. The runaway leader is Adobe Lab’s Flash- and Flex-based BrowserLab. It’s similar to Litmus in that it gives you a side-by-side view of a given URL in a set of chosen browsers. The tool is currently in limited beta and you’ll need an Adobe user account to use the service. Once in, you enter a URL, pick a browser and platform (or choose from the default browser set), then pick your view. As well as side-by-side comparisons, there’s an ‘Onion Skin’ mode that helpfully enables you to see the output of one browser laid over that of another. BrowserLab renders pages using the main browsers on Mac and Windows.
If you’re unable to access BrowserLab, BrowserShots was once a favourite of ours and is still good for checking multiple versions of Internet Explorer on Windows. Support for Macs has waned, but there are Linux- and Windows-based WebKit browsers included. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Apple Safari, and Google Chrome uses a tweaked version.

Check your gamma

A perennial brain-ache for designers working on Macs and PCs is that, until recently, Mac displays had different default gamma settings to PC monitors. These settings determine the relative brightness of the screen. PCs have a gamma setting of 2.2, whereas Macs had a gamma setting of 1.8. We say ‘had’, because that changed with the release of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which sets display gamma to 2.2 – the same as PCs and TVs. Even so, many people still use older Macs, and there’s a disproportionate number of Mac-based designers. The result? Images produced on pre-Snow Leopard Macs can look muddy on PCs, while PC-created pics can seem washed out on older Macs. The solution is to check images at both gamma settings to make sure they look OK either way.

You can never be entirely sure of the look of your site, but it does pay to test varying gamma settings.

Adobe Photoshop has a built-in Mac (or PC) gamma preview feature. Select ‘2 Up’ in the Save for Web dialog, then set an image to render using the setting ‘Macintosh (no colour management)’. It’s arguably more important that Mac-based designers get it right than PC users – and if you’re a Mac owner, you can switch your display to PC gamma in the Display section of the System Preferences panel. Click ‘Colour’, choose the current profile and click ‘Calibrate’. Work your way through the Display Calibration Assistant and choose ‘2.2 Television Gamma’.

Buy a Mac

If you have a lot of sites to test, it might be worth investing in one of Apple’s diminutive Mac Minis. They start at £510 (or even less on the second-hand market), are small, stylish and make excellent media centre PCs. Load yours up with Google Chrome, Camino and Firefox and you’ll be ready to test as many sites as you need to. You don’t even need to leave your PC to do so – you can use free remote desktop software TeamViewer to access and control any application on a TeamViewer-equipped Mac from a PC, or vice versa. The machines don’t even have to be on the same LAN, because connectivity is routed over the internet.

DDA accessibility

Your site needs to be accessible to all users – that’s the law. The Disability Discrimination Act is the main legislation covering this area, and the guidelines you need to match have been laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium. Full details are at www.w3.org/WAI.

Accessibility testing will help make your site available to all potential visitors.

There are fewer online accessibility testing services available in 2010 than there were in 2000 because many of them have become commercial. For example, you can use Adobe Dreamweaver to produce an accessibility report. Go to ‘Site | Reports’, then go through the Accessibility section to select elements to test.
Fujitsu offers a free tool that does a similar job, letting you test your site locally on Windows or Mac OS X. Download the Web Accessibility Inspector from www.bit.ly/aDgNZD. There’s also the Fangs screen reader emulator (www.bit.ly/bDhCfQ). It’s an add-on for Firefox that shows you how your pages will be seen by readers, enabling you to tweak the textual content.

Speed

The need for speed never went away – you should still optimise images and link to multimedia rather than embedding it directly. This is particularly pertinent in the light of Google’s recent admission that page speed is a component of its labyrinthine page rank algorithm.
OctaGate SiteTimer is a free service that not only tells you how speedy your pages are to download, but also pinpoints exactly where any bottlenecks may occur. As pages download, SiteTimer saves data on every element, recording how long each takes to download. More recently, Google came up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that you can use to generate a report on your code and your web server’s efficiency in delivering it. If there’s a bottleneck, Page Speed will find it.

User experience testing

Big web companies pay lots of cash to have their sites tested by specialist usability testing agencies. They’re looking for problems with the navigation system, embedded media and the site’s overall flow. However, you can cobble together your own tests with very few resources. All you really need is a group of people, some computers, a site to test and the right set of questions. Your first task is to gather a test group together. The group doesn’t have to be large, but its makeup should correspond roughly to your site’s target demographic.
Present your subjects with variations on your site or page design. Are you unsure where the shopping cart works best, or whether that dark, hi-tech colour scheme works better than a lighter, cleaner presentation? Try the different layouts out on your group of test subjects.
Put together a list of questions to ask your test group. You could ask them to rate site navigation, look and feel and whether they could easily find what they wanted. You could also ask them specifically what they liked and disliked about each aspect of the site.

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