Before uploading your site to a server and declaring it ready for viewing, it’s a good idea to test it locally. (In fact, it’s a good idea to test and troubleshoot your site frequently throughout its construction—you can catch problems early and avoid repeating them.)
You should make sure that your pages look and work as expected in the browsers you’re targeting, that there are no broken links, and that the pages don’t take too long to download. You can also test and troubleshoot your entire site by running a site report.
The following guidelines will help you create a good experience for visitors to your site:
Your pages should be legible and functional in browsers that do not support styles, layers, plug‑ins, or JavaScript. For pages that fail badly in older browsers, consider using the Check Browser behavior to automatically redirect visitors to another page.
This gives you an opportunity to see differences in layout, color, font sizes, and default browser window size that cannot be predicted in a target browser check.
Other sites undergo redesign and reorganization too, and the page you’re linking to may have been moved or deleted. You can run a link check report to test your links.
Keep in mind that if a page consists of one large table, in some browsers, visitors will see nothing until the entire table finishes loading. Consider breaking up large tables; if this is not possible, consider putting a small amount of content—such as a welcome message or an advertising banner—outside the table at the top of the page so users can view this material while the table downloads.
You can check your entire site for problems, such as untitled documents, empty tags, and redundant nested tags.
Publishing your site—that is, making it live—can be accomplished in several ways and is an ongoing process. An important part of the process is defining and implementing a version-control system, either with the tools Dreamweaver includes or through an external version-control application.
The Dreamweaver discussion forums can be found on the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/dreamweaver_newsgroup.
The forums are a great resource for getting information on different browsers, platforms, and so on. You can also discuss technical issues and share helpful hints with other Dreamweaver users.
For a tutorial on troubleshooting publishing problems, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0164.
You can run site reports on workflow or HTML attributes. You can also use the Reports command to check links in your site.
Workflow reports can improve collaboration among members of a web team. You can run workflow reports that display who has checked out a file, which files have Design Notes associated with them, and which files have been modified recently. You can further refine Design Note reports by specifying name/value parameters.
Note:
You must have a remote site connection defined to run the workflow reports.
HTML reports enable you to compile and generate reports for several HTML attributes. You can check combinable nested font tags, missing Alt text, redundant nested tags, removable empty tags, and untitled documents.
After you run a report, you can save it as an XML file, then import it into a template instance or a database or spreadsheet and print it, or display it on a website.
Note:
You can also add different report types to Dreamweaver through the Adobe Dreamweaver Exchange website.
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Note:
If you selected more than one workflow report, you need to click the Report Settings button for each report. Select a report, click Report Settings, and enter settings; then, repeat the process for any other workflow reports.
Checked Out By
Creates a report listing all documents checked out by a specific team member. Enter the name of a team member, and then click OK to return to the Reports dialog box.
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Combinable Nested Font Tags
Creates a report that lists all nested font tags that can be combined to clean up the code.
For example, <font color="#FF0000"><font size="4">STOP!</font></font> is reported.
Missing Alt Text
Creates a report listing all the img tags that don’t have alternate text.
Alternate text appears in place of images for text-only browsers or for browsers that have been set to download images manually. Screen readers read alternate text, and some browsers display alternate text when the user mouses over the image.
Redundant Nested Tags
Creates a report detailing nested tags that should be cleaned up.
For example, <i> The rain <i> in</i> Spain stays mainly in the plain</i> is reported.
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Click the column heading you want to sort results by.
You can sort by filename, line number, or description. You can also run several different reports and keep the different reports open.
Select any line in the report, then click the More Info button on the left side of the Site Reports panel for a description of the problem.
Double-click any line in the report to view the corresponding code in the Document window.
Note:
If you are in Design view, Dreamweaver changes the display to split view to show the reported problem in code.
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When you save a report, you can import it into an existing template file. You can then import the file into a database or spreadsheet and print it, or use the file to display the report on a website.
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After running HTML reports, use the Clean Up HTML command to correct any HTML errors the reports listed.
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