Testing and Publishing a Site > Testing and publishing overview

Testing and publishing overview

Before uploading your site to a server and declaring it ready for viewing, it's a good idea to test it locally. (In fact, it's a good idea to test and troubleshoot your site frequently throughout its construction—you can catch problems early and avoid repeating them.) You want to make sure that your pages look and work as expected in the browsers you're targeting, that there are no broken links, and that the pages don't take too long to download. You can also test and troubleshoot your entire site by running a site report before you publish your site.

The following guidelines will help you create a good experience for visitors to your site:

	Make sure your pages function as expected in the browsers you're targeting and that they "fail gracefully" in other browsers. Your pages should be legible and functional in browsers that do not support styles, layers, plug-ins, or JavaScript. (See Checking for browser compatibility.) For pages that will fail badly in older browsers, consider using the Check Browser behavior to automatically redirect visitors to another page. (See Check Browser.)
	Preview your pages in as many different browsers and on as many different platforms as possible. This gives you an opportunity to see differences in layout, color, font sizes, and default browser window size that cannot be predicted in a target browser check. (See Previewing in browsers.)
	Check your site for broken links (and fix them). Other sites undergo redesign and reorganization too, and the page you're linking to may have been moved or deleted. For a simple list of links to external sites, you can run a link check. Alternatively, you can run a site-wide report that checks for and produces a report on invalid external links. (See Checking links in a page or site, Opening linked documents in Dreamweaver, or Creating reports.)
	Monitor the size of your pages and the time they take to download. Keep in mind that for pages that consist of one large table, visitors will see nothing until the entire table has finished loading. Consider breaking up large tables; if this is not possible, consider putting a small amount of content—such as a welcome message or an advertising banner—outside the table at the top of the page so users can view this material while the table downloads. (See Checking download time and size; for more information on using layer behaviors to cover the screen while a page loads, see Show-Hide Layers.)
	Run a few site reports to test and troubleshoot the entire site. You can check your entire site for problems such as untitled documents, empty tags, and redundant nested tags. Running these reports before you publish your site means fewer problems later on. (See Creating reports.)
	Publishing your site—that is, pushing it out and making it live—can be accomplished in several ways and is an ongoing process. Once the bulk of the site has been published, you or your team will continue to update and maintain it. Defining and implementing a version-control system, either with the tools Dreamweaver includes or through an external version-control application, is an important process.
	Use the Macromedia Dreamweaver discussion forums found at the Macromedia Web site. This is a great resource for getting information on different browsers, platforms, and so on.