Testing and Debugging

No matter the method you choose to maintain your site on an intranet, there’s no escaping testing and debugging, not if you want all your previous efforts to be in vain. There are a number of ways to test a web site and you should use as many of them as possible. Some you can do yourself; others involve people with no prior knowledge of your site.

Start with the basic tools at hand. Use a spell checker if available. Test pages with different browsers. Force the browser to get all content including text and images by turning off caching and emptying the cache from the browser. Then time how long the pages take to load.

If your pages use any Java or scripting language, check it out with a browser that has Java disabled or doesn’t have it at all. Include all plug-ins that are on your site also.

Test on different platforms (although this may not be as necessary on a corporate intranet). Sometimes pages look quite different even with the same browser on different types of computers such as PCs and Macs.

Don’t forget to check the server log. Look for errors from CGI scripts, bad links and missing images. Pay attention when someone reports difficulty viewing your site. Usually only a small percentage of the total users experiencing problems will report them, so there are probably many more that gave up (Tony Karp, 1997).

As noted at the beginning of this section, designing your intranet site and deciding on the content is only the beginning. All the time and labor spent involved in the creative tasks – design and content decisions – will be wasted without a concerted and comprehensive maintenance program. The repetitive and somewhat unexciting task of maintenance is a critical part of the entire web site development process. As Tony Karp wrote, "It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it."

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