31189a - Learning Activity 06

31189a – Learning Activity 6

Testing

Visit the W3C Validation (HTML, CSS) testing site and run a sample test of a favourite website.
Click on LINK 18 to view the Mark-up Validation Service website
• Do a search to discover the three most popular web browsers.
• Assemble some useful questions that you could ask in a user trial.
TIP: Navigate to the student forum to engage in the discussion.

Answer

Once a site has been designed and built, it will go through a series of tests, culminating in a launch phase.

During testing, you may ask a group of people to give feedback about content, design elements and the interactivity of the site. Once tested, the site is transferred to a live server so it can be seen publicly or by a smaller group of people involved in further testing. At this stage, you could run validation checks, and check for broken links or missing images. Cross-browser checking in different browsers (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, iPhone, BlackBerry) is also crucial.

Even earlier in the process, when you have initial designs, it is good practice to ask others to look at your concepts and give you feedback before progressing them.

Here is the link to the W3C Validation testing site: http://validator.w3.org/.  

The popular site I chose for testing was Facebook: http://www.facebook.com.  As this site is a very comprehensive site, there are bound to be error messages present when running tests on this site.

Here is how the site looks after testing it under W3C[1] (I will not even go into detail there).

According to Wikipedia, the three most popular browsers are Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari.  Internet Explorer is sixth down this list[2].  The latest results of another study by the W3 School[3] of five different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera) suggests that Chrome enjoys the highest rates of browser usage at 73.7%, followed by Firefox (15.5%), and then Internet Explorer (4.8%).

As my computer has Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, I am most likely to use these browsers to test the website. 

So, what I would need to know is what browsers does my client use, how will the website look when using them, and what devices will the client use?  In turn, this will determine how I will design the web site, in terms of what content could I include on it, whether or not I would have to do a fixed or fluid width, include responsive or static content, or should it be mobile-only site.




[1]https://validator.w3.org/nu/?showsource=yes&showoutline=yes&showimagereport=yes&doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
[3] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

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