Web site themes offer web site owners a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing their site, but even the greatest web site theme or design doesn’t come without issues, such as how it interacts with different programs. For example, if it’s a flash based site, how does it operate on older versions of flash? Another issue that could arise is that with Firefox supporting Third-Party plugins there may be additional issues that result from that. While it would be impossible to download and install every possible Firefox plugin, downloading and installing the top 10 most popular ones wouldn’t be that difficult. The most popular user installed current version plugins can be found at LatestVersionPlugin.com.
When to Test Your Design?
The best possible time to check your web design is early on in the implementation and construction phase. Basically you want to know right away how your site design functions within each browser, and while these is a time consuming processing, it’s also a worthwhile investment. Because a bad web design/site will result in your visitors, one leaving before they should and two not returning or spreading to word about your site. Which as we know will lead to a drop in traffic and income.
What to Test?
Before you start testing your new web site design you’ll need to create a list of items to test, one of the things you need to consider is any updates you did to the code. You’ll need to see if it functions in the same manner as before.
Things that you must test are:
- Make sure that you are covering all the modern browsers i.e. latest versions of Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer (IE). You would find that most of them come with a proper updating system and testing the latest one can give you results for the older versions too.
- You need to include all the previous versions of IE from 7 onwards. If you have access to windows machine then that won’t be difficult, otherwise you may need to use a browser testing service or emulator such as browserstack.com.
- Testing your sites compatibility on mobile browsers is crucial now as a significant portion of web traffic is generated from mobile devices.
Which pages to test?
- If you need to choose which pages should be tested the answer would depend upon the size of the web site and the number of pages. If there are huge number of pages then it’s okay to test only the ones which have different unique designs features. Always test against various screen resolution. By resizing the browser window while testing you can easily accomplish it. All these tests are done as because people have different taste and they use different browsers as per their need.
With a little bit of preparation and time, the shift to a new website can be seamless like any minor update that you do on your website.
