Friday, April 13, 2012

How to Validate and Test Your Designs for the Mobile Web


The mobile industry is ever expanding with users who use their mobile device to surf the online world. Due to this increasing use, many users want to access abundance of websites right from their mobile devices but are often turned down from websites that are not working on their devices.

Many web developers and designers do not actually know of many tools that can help them test their websites on different platforms, which can often cause frustration. They should be more aware of the tools that will help make websites more mobile friendly across many platforms.

Once website is implemented, designed and optimized, it is time for validation and usability testing. Validation and testing may not be the most exciting areas in web design, but they are just as important in ensuring everything looks great.

This provides means of correcting any problems before revealing your site to the public. There are several ways to validate your website. Most importantly, you should validate your HTML, CSS and SEO, as well as ensuring that you have no broken links or images.

Code Validation:

At times the error associates more to the codes used besides just a few misplaced HTML tags here and there.

In this case, the W3C validator can be used to find simple markup errors. This validator is the quickest and easiest way to check your website or mobile website to see if it is mobile friendly or not. Once you have received the green light from several validators, you will need to get a few different types of phones to perform some actual tests.


Browser Compatibility Testing:

Make sure your website looks the same on all of the major browsers i.e. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and Opera. It is also important to test previous browser versions since many web users are still using them. Additionally, you may want to test our your site on mobile web browsers as well, for example using mobiReady. Making your site easily accessible through mobile devices is becoming more and more important.





Usability Testing:

It is crucial to have people other than yourself test your website. This can reveal problems that are not obvious to the designer. Be sure to have the users explore the website fully, and have them give feedback in terms of the design, colors, content, navigation, layout and performance of the site.

In conclusion, validation of websites is a good practice. It is one hidden secrets of an effective and quality web design. Make sure you validate your website today before it hits the general public!

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