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Bill Machrone
QA quandary? How to check your site's look on the cheap

Bill Machrone
Contributing Editor PC Magazine
Tuesday, April 3, 2001
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Why didn't somebody think of this sooner? Anyone who has ever created a Web page has heard from someone, somewhere that it doesn't display correctly on their machine. How do you do adequate testing and quality assurance?

If you're a small shop or if it's just you, you can't afford the investment--in time or money--of three, four, or half a dozen different hardware platforms, compounded by different browsers and different screen resolutions. Add to that the time that it takes to run a new site or page through each, and you're talking a serious commitment to QA.

That's why Browser Photo is such a good idea. You subscribe to the service (or pay once for a single analysis) and give it a URL to check out. It brings up your page in 14 different popular browser/platform/resolution combinations and e-mails images of what it saw back to you.

BROWSER PHOTO IS NOT a complete QA checkup, just a visual backstop to make sure your pages don't look ridiculous on a platform that you're not familiar with. It should, however, be a welcome addition to the code checks and common-sense precautions you take in preparing any site for publication.

I know it would have saved me some grief. I recently prepared a page that had a lot of pictures with text wrapped around them. I published it on the fly, right from my laptop. It looked great. Fifteen minutes later, I got my first e-mail complaining that the pictures were hitting one another, which broke the table structure, which caused everything to fly off to the right.

The problem? In one of my laptop's docking configurations, I had large fonts turned on. They affect applications, too, not just Windows font sizes. So what looked to be perfectly wrapped on my machine didn't work at all on a machine with normal fonts. Browser Photo would have spotted that one immediately.

The details are in PC Magazine's review. I think you're going to like this one.

Got a good way to handle QA? TalkBack to me.

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