When we design websites, we generally think that the basic steps involved are creating the concept and interface, procuring the web space, and having basic knowledge of a website creation language. But often there is one very crucial step which we miss out. That step is testing how the design of our website would look on different web browsers. Since in today’s tech-savvy world, new platforms, new devices and new web browsers keep launching in the market, it is important that we test our websites on different combinations of all of them to see how the look and feel changes.
The sleek fonts and colors that you may have used on your development machine might not be available on some other machine which does not support that font or maybe which has a different web browser. And surely, if you’re website layout goes haywire every time someone tries to open it on a different browser or on a different device or platform, it’s a huge mood and effort spoiler. To avoid this, there is a simple technique available called Web Browser Testing.
Web Browser Testing involves testing the look and feel of your web-pages on different operating systems, browsers and different types of machines including desktops / laptops, smart-phones or tablets. So it is basically a technique of finding out where something could go wrong with the design and making measures to avoid it beforehand.
You’re probably thinking that all of this sounds very easy but it would require a lot of geeky knowledge. Well, no! And now if you’re thinking that you would at least need to possess a good number of devices with different browser combinations or at least setup some virtual machines to test your website, the answer is again, no!
To overcome this issue, a few innovative minds have come up with online tools and techniques which can help you perform such tests without hassle. The purpose of these tools is to offer an all inclusive platform which can virtually provide you with a combination of any number of operating systems and web browsers that you can think of. Some examples of good web browser testing online tools are Browser Stack, Browser Ling, Browser Shots, etc.
These tools allow you to test your live websites on any local or internal servers from anywhere, at anytime and from any browser. You can see what your web pages will look like on Windows, Mac or other operating systems. What’s more you can test your websites with different versions of a web browser, for example, with all versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, etc. Some of them even let you test your HTML, CSS or JavaScript files so that you can make changes and see effects immediately. Testing the look of a Flash plug-in and experimenting with resizing the website are also available options.
All in all, such tools are a huge help to web designers and web testers all across the world. Of course, all cool things come at a price. So you can either try these tools for free or sign up for one of their plans and take additional benefits.