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Access!Try out all the methods mentioned under topic 8 to review your page for accessibility. Resize the screen, turn off the images, read a list of the links, and so forth to see how your page may appear to other viewers. Type the URL of your page into the Lynx View program to see how it looks there. Try out your page and answer the questions at the Bobby Access Validating program. . . .and yet other viewsBe sure that you try out the page in both Netscape and Explorer, since these are the two most popular browsers. If possible, find an older version of the browsers to view your page. "Normal" people (that is, people who do not themselves design web pages) tend to be more conservative about upgrading browsers. Even though you have a 4.0+ browser, perhaps a third of your audience are still using 3.0 browsers. Jakob Nielsen has written a good article about how slowly people upgrade browsers that web designers should consider seriously. Especially if you usually work with a cable or T1 connection, try out your page on a slow modem. If that is not possible (or in addition to trying the slow connection), review the file size of each page. Remember that the rule of thumb is 1 second download time for each 1K of data. Are you asking people to wait more than a minute to download your page? If they have been forewarned, they will wait for that terrific graphic or multimedia object, but otherwise they may skip off elsewhere. Also check your work on more than one operating system. The same version of a browser, such as Netscape 4.5, may display differently on a Mac than on a pc using Windows. Even Windows 95 and Windows NT may do variations on your page. Check the article by Matthew Haughey, Tester's Delight, to see how a serious, professional designer checks his pages. Continue to "Search Engines " >> Other comment notes for this unit: |
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