Before taking part in any competition we test our abilities, our capabilities, our power. Similarly Web World is also a competition, you just cannot create a site an expect it will be able to handle itself in different circumstances. Take a simple example, you may have hand-coded it using full url’s in your computer, or by some WYSIWYG editor, maybe you tested the whole thing in Opera, do you expect it to act similarly in all other browsers? Do you know if all your links are valid and not giving 404 error. Even if your do standard W3C compatible coding you may get wrong somewhere and you may need to test its compatibility. So that’s what this post is for this will teach you different ways you can test your site fully before jumping into the real web and give all your users a similar taste. As a matter of fact my website was not tested and I implemented the theme in hurry and now I’m suffering, it works badly in IE6.

Standard Check

First thing you should do after you have finished coding you new site is validate it if your markups are XHTML, HTML, SMIL etc (depending of the one you selected) are valid and conform to that standards set by various organisation. For validation of single page you can use W3C’s own validation service. But I guess you are wanting to validate whole of your site in that case head on to Validator.ca.

Incase your feeling the options of both the above sites are not enough for you you should try a test at Uitest. It has all the standard………..

…….. Wait what happened???? Ok here’s the thing I have to stop the research right here, cause Uitest has everything I was going to tell you about, Accessibility, General, Legal, Links, Performance, SEO, Validation, Browsers, Colors, Fonts, Generators, Graphics, Network and Security, Optimizers, SEO … and loads of other, it has all types of test you need.

But I have to sum up this article, so mainly you should do 5 basic checks for you site which are absolutely necessary if you don’t want to suffer (like me)

1)      Standards Validator (use Validator.ca its fast and straight forward)

2)      Browser Test ( Use Browsershots )

3)      Website Load Test ( Use Pingdom )

4)      CSS Validator ( Use W3C )

5)      Dead Links Validator ( Use W3C )

Other Validation’s which are optional but you can try them depending on the your site audience and content are :

1)      Accessibility Test ( Check At Wave)

2)      Feed Validator (Use W3C )

3)      SEO Check ( It’s a complete subject in itself but you can start at Raven)

4)      DNS Check ( Out of topic but wanted you to know, use IntoDNS )

There are many many and many other types of checks, which I personally don’t think you should do, the main thing is it depends on the site, for example if you are building a site for older people you should obviously do accessibility check, colour blind checks, etc. I’d also recommend all sites to do a Virus check at Norton Safeweb, to gain your users faith. If you know other specialised service please let me know so I can add it here. Thanks for visiting