So Who Does Testing Anymore?

In the last few years I have noticed that less and less web developers do enough testing on their content. Since a lot of us are responsible for the content management why should we care.

The answer is simple. It is very easy for them and others to mistake what a CMS system does in the form or an xform, or templated content instead of something with their page. If you add that to the fact that we are all responsible for the sites under our control what can we do to help.

We have all seen the issues, and reported them to the developer only to be told any one of the following:

"It looked good in Firefox"
"I tested it in I.E. 7"
"You know XP displays things differently"
"Who uses a MAC?"

So to start off : I really like Firefox as well, and use it all the time, but the reality is for most of the sites that I manage Firefox is still not used as much as I.E, so looking at something mainly in Firefox is a bad idea, and I do try to point that out to the developers when this happens.

I.E. 7... ok this is new, and a lot of people are using it. Some by choice, some with just how Microsoft does the updates. With this said both browser handle certain things differently and again you need to make sure your developers who give you the base pages for you to create templates or xforms from have tested in both.

XP handles things differently? I've heard this and ones like it, and I know that on different operating systems there can be differences but again if they know something does not work in an OS or has been known to fail then I have a great idea "Don't do that!"

Who uses a Mac... Well I agree! Who does... well the problem with this is that usually the companies that have settled on a Mac try to only work with other companies and sites that look good with what they have. It only makes sense. So when possible if there is a chance someone with a Mac is going to hit your site then again have the developers test in it.

With all of the above said as we manage sites we are going to have to deal with this as best we can. So what I have found that may help you are to find out from the site owner(s) what their target audience is, and then try to have a testing environment that can test in all of the different browser versions, and operating systems. Tools like VMWare and others can help with this, or even the old dual boot on a test machine to give you multiple OS's could help.

For xforms and template development what I advise doing is to verify before you get into building the presentations that what you are working with has been tested. It does not take long to know.

I realize that changing a presentation and re-generating a page/site, or a css change is not that complex but it will help you when you hear from someone who is not the web developer that a page created with your xform looked bad.

With the above said I use linux so my blog looks good to me, and who out there does not use linux! So no complaints on the format of the blog ;-)