Test your Web site on different browsers
In the commercial realm, Web site testing is an expensive process that involves user sessions, design teams, and long hours in tedious meetings. In the independent realm, testing costs nothing and is usually accomplished in a matter of minutes.
The testing process should begin the moment you complete your first template. At this point, you should view the template on as many operating systems and browsers as possible. The point behind this is to catch any design glitches that may pop up on different configurations. Your template probably looks perfect on your home computer, but from time to time there are display discrepancies between browsers and platforms. It's best to catch these problems before you start building lots of pages.
Ideally, you should test your template on the two most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape. This means if the latest versions of Internet Explorer are 5.5 and 6.0, you should get your hands on copies of both versions. You can find older versions of browsers at evolt.org.
You should also test your template on a Windows computer and a Macintosh. Each operating system has its own design quirks.
The wildcard in testing is America Online. A lot of people -- somewhere around 35 million -- subscribe to AOL, so it needs to be taken seriously from a testing standpoint. If you don't have an AOL account, you can download a free trial and test your site, or, if you don't want to deal with the hassle of canceling the account, you can find an AOL subscriber and ask them very nicely if they could look at your page. It's not a scientific process, but it will give you a decent sense of your page's AOL appearance.
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