Checking your web site for Browser presentation consistency
When designing a web site, you generally want to test your pages consistent appearance in any type of browser. In other words, your work of art should not look different depending on the color of eyeglass frames someone is viewing it through.
In general, designing using XHTML, CSS, and validating your design using the w3.org validator will get you very close to a consistent appearance among many browsers on various operating systems. Once you’ve done this part, the more difficult task is checking your site presentation on multiple platforms and web browsers.
In the past, the only way of checking your site for presentation in multiple browsers was to have workstations (or virtual machines) running each type of OS along with each web browser, at each screen resolution, with various plug-ins (such as Flash) which you desired to check against. As you can well imagine, this can be out of reach for the average small business or designer both on the basis of budget and time constraints.
One solution to this issue has been conceived and implemented thanks to Johann Rocholl. It is a free web service called BrowserShots and it allows you to submit your site for snapshots in many different browsers in only a few seconds. What happens then is the web site is visited via many computers running the selected OS, browser, screen resolution, and plug-ins which you selected. Depending on the length of the queue, you may have a wait of 30 minutes or so for the results, but it is worth the wait. Once you have your screen shots you will know what additional work you (or your web developer) need to complete. No technical aptitude is needed to use the site so I invite you to check the job your developer is doing by submitting the site for snapshots and looking at what the rest of the world sees when visiting your web site.
The entire service is volunteer and free so you may want to limit the frequency of submitting jobs to the queue to allow resources to be available for others. The service is in beta stage at the present so there may be issues form time to time. Hats off to Johann Rochall and his volunteers for a great and idea and service with BrowserShots.org