Designing a website is a process that takes time and patience to succeed. In many cases, you will spend many days planning and designing your website. As a successful designer, you will try to be meticulous and you will try to make sure that you are able to get the best possible design for your website. However, sometimes no matter how hard that you may try, you just might have problems with your website development. After days and weeks of hard work, you may find out that the end product really does not look like what you intended.
Another problem that you may have will be that during the test deployment of your website, you may see that it has several bugs that need to be fixed. This can especially happen in the instances in which dynamic content is used. These problems can also show themselves when you are using a different web browser for designing, but a different one for viewing. In fact, the problems outlined above are more common then you may think; but the important issue is the ability to deal with them.
- Make sure that you are using different browsers to test a certain web page within your website. Whenever you are testing your website, test each page on 5-6 different browsers. Don’t forget that not every one uses Microsoft products and you have to think about Linux platforms, as well as different web browsers like Mozilla. This way you can make sure that your website performs the same way in each browser. If you see that you can not fix the design problem, you can always create different web pages for the different web browsers and you can place their icons in your main page.
- Try and test your color schemes on different monitors. Sometimes a CRT monitor can show some tables and graphics differently than a LCD monitor. One of the best ways to deal with these problems is to use a centered approach, as you won’t put too many elements near the edges since these can get cropped on different monitors.
- Test your websites on different computers and on different download speeds. Even using a different platform like Linux can cause unexpected bugs to pop up during your test phase. It is better to be aware of these problems so that you can fix them by working on them. If you are using any special scripts or programs, it is best that you try to refrain yourself from using too advanced programming.
- Test the SEO compatibility of your website by using the various tools on the Internet. Test for things like keyword density and other things like Meta tag recognition. Also look for any broken links in your website before you deploy it on the Internet. Make sure that all your tags and page titles are all filled. Test your webpage with a virtual spider to see how it would be viewed by search engines.
Peter Brittain
Perth Digital Agency