Testing, Testing, and More Testing

Before you publish your site, you need to give it the white-glove treatment. Expression Web comes with two built-in tools that make testing easy.

The Expression Web Accessibility Checker scans your site to make sure that it complies with accessibility guidelines so that visitors with impaired vision or other disabilities can use the site. The Compatibility Checker looks for any problems in the code. Both tools mark the spots in your pages where guidelines aren't met or lines of code are below par. Each tool then offers its advice for fixing the problems.

Expression Web also comes with a number of reports that help you find other faults before you go live, such as broken hyperlinks (which go nowhere) and unlinked (orphan) pages.

Here's a dress-rehearsal checklist for preparing your Web site for its big debut:

• Run the Accessibility Checker. (We tell you how later in this chapter.)

• Run the Compatibility Checker. (We tell you how later in this chapter.)

• Run a CSS report to check for errors in your external style sheets. (We tell you how in Chapter 9.)

• Verify your hyperlinks to make sure they work properly. (We tell you how in Chapter 4.)

• Run other problem-oriented reports, such as these:

  • Slow Pages report (choose Site Reports Problems Slow Pages)

  • Unlinked Pages report (Site Reports Problems Unlinked Pages)

• Check for spelling errors (choose Tools Spelling Spelling) and proofread all your pages.

• Preview your site in a number of Web browsers at different screen resolutions (and, ideally, on more than one operating system platform) to catch problems caused by inconsistencies in the way browsers interpret CSS styles. (We tell you how in Chapter 2.)

The impotence of proofreading

We had you there for a moment, didn't we? As much as it pains our copyeditor to leave that typo in the sidebar title, we felt that it best illustrates the importance of proofreading. Nothing is more damaging to a beautifully designed Web site's reputation than a page full of full of typos. And as the previous sentence demonstrates (take a second look at it), spell checkers can do only so much. One unconventional-but-effective way to proofread your pages is to detach their style sheets temporarily (we show you a quick way to do that in Chapter 9) and then print their content. Words on paper simply look different from words on the screen, and you're more likely to catch errors when you read your text in stark black and white. Or, you can enlist a picky friend to proofread your site. Nothing works like a fresh pair of eyes to ferret out errors you overlooked.