Many of our clients have their own websites and I am sure a lot
of people who read this blog post will also have their own
websites, but my question for you all is how standard compliant is
your website?
The reason I thought I would blog about ensuring your website is
standard compliant is because of the pletheral of web browsers that
are now available and all the different potential client devices
that might be accessing your website, have you tested your website
with Opera on a Nokia Phone, or Safari on both an iMac and an
iPhone?
Most of us don't have time to test that our websites work on
every browser and client device under the sun, but if you ensure
your website has at least conformed to the basic XHTML standards
then you at least have a good chance that any modern browser will
correctly render your site.
There are lots of really useful tools available and I thought I
would list a few that you might find useful:
For those of you who have not heard of (where have you been
hiding?) or have not installed Firefox, that would be my first
recommendation as there are a lot of very good browser plugins for
firefox that will help in your quest for the perfect website.
Download Firefox
The following Firefox plugins are very useful:
Firebug - The ultimate developers companion
that allows you to edit your code and see the changes live in the
browser, this is invaluable if you are a budding developer
HTML Validator - This plugin is good for
everyone, techie or not as it will highlight when you have errors
in your code and you can then call your web developer to update
your site if it's not you.
Screen Grab - This enables you to easily take
a screen shot of your website
Finally a useful website for testing your website across
multiple browsers is Browsershots , you simply give them your
website URL and then they take screen shots across many platforms
and different browsers, so within a few minutes you can see if you
have any errors on other platforms, very cool!