How to catch eyeballs

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Monday , March 31, 2008 at 0202 hrs You may have developed your website using an expensive ‘what you see is what you get’ editor but that doesn’t guarantee that visitors ‘will get the website as you see it’.

Your site audience could be using a different browser or an operating system that you may have never worked on before, their system may not have certain fonts that are used in your site design, the resolution of their computer screen may be too low and so on. Designing a website is therefore just half the work done. You will need to extensively test the various elements and features of your website to ensure a good consistent experience so that visitors don’t leave your site in a jiffy.

Here are some useful tools to help you check your website:

Browsershots is an online tool that automatically captures full page screenshot images of your website in various browsers across all different OS platforms. You also have the option to preview the website design in browsers with or without Flash, Java and JavaScript.

Browsershots is extremely popular and you may therefore have to wait a few minutes for this service to render screenshots of your website.

IE NetRenderer is another service that’s much faster than Browsershots but it can check the rendering only for different versions of Internet Explorer. If your visitors are from the Mac site, you may also want to check out BrowsrCamp which is like Browsershot but for Mac OS browsers only.

To see how your website appears on the small screens of mobile phones like the BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, check out BrowserCam. Another good option is the Opera Simulator that lets you experience a mobile version of Opera from the desktop.

There are people who are on slow dial-up connections and their population in not insignificant especially in the developing world. You therefore need to make sure that the average loading time of your HTML web pages along with all the Javascript Ads, Images, CSS, Flash animations, etc is within reason limits.

Pingdom is a free online service that mimics the way a page is loaded in the web browser. It shows statistics (size, loading time) for every object on the web page so you know the culprits that may slow down the website.