Last year, I redesigned my newly-designed CSS Sqwink site. I used an Apple G5, like designers do, to hand-code it. The only thing was, throughout the entire process, I wanted to test it on various PC browsers, as I was using a Mac. I’ve read online that many designers’ buy PC’s for emulation purposes, so I bought an older PC laptop in order to test it in IE6.
Whilst testing, it occurred to me that I need to test it on IE7 and Mozilla Firefox browsers for PC’s also. Not been a PC person, I wasn’t prepared to start buying more equipment just for site testing, nor partition drives for multiple browser installs. I also didn’t want to shell out for a Mac ‘Virtual Windows’.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was searching the web one day soon after, and discovered the most amazing tool - BrowserShots.org (screen shot below). The concept of this site is really quite simple. You just input your site URL in the top box and select different browsers for Linux, Windows and Mac. Each selection is effectively a request to see a screenshot of your site - that’s the money-saving beauty of this service! You submit and your site URL is added to a list until these ‘BrowserShots’ are available online for you to browse at your leisure.
The benefits of BrowserShots is that you can see multiple shots of what your site looks like not just in various browsers on 3 platforms, but various versions of these browsers too! So, you don’t need to be partitioning 4 PC’s or nipping over to a friends house to see your CSS site in all its’ glory. Obviously, there’s a downside to this…you only see what your site LOOKS like, not how it functions - and to see every page, you have to re-submit each one.
All-in-all though, BrowserShots saves much time, money and effort when developing and testing your CSS masterpiece. I hope this article helps you in your designs. Any questions or comments are welcome…
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