1. The Web Wizard’s Guide to Web Design
Chapter 8
Testing and Posting the Site

2. Technical Testing What should you test? Basically: Test EVERYTHING!
Browser
All popular and likely used browsers
Platform
All popular and likely used platforms
Display
All popular and likely used display resolutions
Bandwidth
Plug-in
Basically: Test EVERYTHING!

3. Technical Testing – Browser
95% of users:
Internet Explorer
Gecko/Mozilla Family
Netscape Navigator
Mozilla
FireFox
Safari
5% use something else
What does your target audience use?
Sites don’t have to be identical – they just have to work properly and be “close enough”

4. Technical Testing - Browser
What should you look for?
How is text displayed?
How do the images align with each other and with text?
Are tables/frames arranged properly?
Are sound, video, and animation handled properly?

5. Technical Testing - Platform
Type: PC
Laptop
Other? OS
Windows
Macintosh
UNIX
Linux

6. Technical Testing - Platform
What should you look for?
Fonts
Colors
Filename problems between *IX, Macs and PCs
IE and FireFox (Mozilla) run differently on different platforms

7. Technical Testing - Display
Pixel Setting
800x600
640x480
1024x768
1240x1024
1680x1050 (wide)
etc…
Color Depth
“TrueColor” 24/32-bit
16-bit
8-bit

8. Technical Testing - Bandwidth
Connection speeds
8 seconds!
Test at slowest speed for maximum effect
Method
Bandwidth
50K Download Time
56K Modem
56K
7.1
ISDN
128K
3.1
DSL K
1.6
Cable Modem
521K
0.8
LAN
1MB+
0.4

9. Technical Testing - Bandwidth
How to fix problems?
Reduce number of images
Compress images
Reduces visual quality but downloads faster
Use thumbnails
Use text for navigation instead of images or graphics

10. Technical Testing – Plug-ins
Two problems:
Not all users will have all the plug-ins needed
Not all users will be comfortable installing plug-ins
Provide users with
Which plug-ins are needed
Where they can be obtained
How to install them
How to configure for your site’s use

11. User Testing Let users get their hands on your site
Under what circumstances?
Casual surfer or business critical?
Home or office? (or somewhere else?)
New user or long-term relationship?
Novice or experienced user?

12. User Testing Collect their reactions Direct observation
Indirect observation
Ask for their feedback directly
Survey
Questionnaire

13. Posting the Site Servers Windows NT Series Apple Mac *ix
Unix
AIX
Linux
Windows NT Series
Windows 2003 Server
Apple Mac
OSX

14. Posting the Site Web Server has some software to “serve” web pages
Apache (*IX, MS)
MS IIS
Configuring the Web Server
Read the manual
Hire someone else to do it
Rent space on a server
Hire an IT staff

15. Posting the Site Upload your tested material to Web Server Manually
Depends on server location/environment
FTP
Copy files directory to directory
Use a service
Visual Studio
Dreamweaver

16. Making the Connection Register your site Benefits
Hosted on someone else’s server under their domain name
Register your own domain name (still has to be hosted on someone else’s server)
Benefits
Available to search engines

17. Assignment
None!