Check your Site

Okay, you've had your site designed by a professional, and it looks good in Internet Explorer on your 19" monitor. But, what about others? While IE has over 75% of the browser market, there are now many more browsers, and IE has been slipping. What that means is your users may not be using IE, and many will not have a 19" monitor.

In order to make sure your clients and potential customers are getting through, you'll probably want to check it under other conditions. One such condition is the monitor resolution. At one time, 640 x 800 was common; now most people have at least 600 x 800, and many that have larger monitors may not browse full-screen. So, the first thing is to view the sites with your screen sized down to approximately 600 x 800.

Second, download and install the most common browsers and versions in use today. Most of them are free. At this writing, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera are the most common. For the most discriminating analysis, install different versions of each when available. Then for each version follow all the links to view all pages and try all features.

There is a common misconception that pages are/should be designed for a particular browser. While each browser has its quirks, IE more than others, a good web page design should be viewable in all compliant browsers.

Third, if you have a lot of graphics, you may want to repeat this process with your monitor set to different color depths. I believe there are three or four settings ranging from 256 color up to 16 million.

Finally, to really put the pages to a test, you can validate it with one of the validation services. Visit the service site, type in your web site address and have it validate. They will report on the problems with your page, and maybe the seriousness of the problem.If you've already tested the pages with the browsers you've installed, then this test is mostly in anticipation of future problems.