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In many ways Soup's test room is a lie. The machines all run fairly recent versions of Internet Explorer, none of them are seriously underpowered and none of them are in regular production use. This means that no-one changes their fonts or installs an office bar or anything so heinous. It also means the res creeps up to 1024 once in a while. A much better way to test a product is on site. That major shoe company site I developed would have launched a day earlier if we had gone on-site and tested on their machines. Their MD had a copy of IE 4 which we can't get because it's Win 95 only. I think the same applies to Flash and Director.

An additional benefit is that if errors do occur they can be fixed then and their to the customers satisfaction. No more ringing up and saying "I've changed it, can you check it again for me? OK, so, right, what's it doing now? [cue 5 minute description of something unrelated to the error].

Test on-site, even if you hate them and it's fucking miles away.

Or "My customers can't find anything on my site!"

A very tricky problem in web design is how to organise the information on the site into categories. Card sorting solves this problem in a way that's really pretty obvious.

You write out the items you're going to have on the site on cards (assume for a moment we're just talking about a bunch of simple documents you want to publish). Then you take that stack of cards and ask a customer to group them for you. Take a note of what they do, then go see another customer and ask them. Do this with a few customers, the client and maybe some other people and then look what consensus arises.

Frickin' obvious. Gold dust. Thank you DoS.

I just finished my first site of my second bout of freelancism. Certa Solutions went live about half an hour ago. I didn't do the design, BTW, just the build.

Building the site I fell into the same patterns that I often do when building straight HTML. The effort of maintaining consistency between 40+ pages outweighs everything else. To this end I've thought about converting all the content to XML and then building a set of XSL transformations to generate the site. Then the computer can do the repetive bit! Ha! The trick would then be to balance the content out between nodes - much easier than distributing it around one document.

I may try to rebuild Certa using this technique, but more likely I think I'll leave it until next time I have to do something similar. Hypothetical is a priority, and Fog needs a page which means rebuilding this site.

Also today I joined the Smarty mailing list and found out that my problems with it are not due to it, but my PHP build. Installing it on a more predictable BSD machine (this one) worked fine. Smarty is a template engine, the PHP teams measures to seperate logic from design. It's pretty fast, although I don't have the numbers for other systems like Zope or JSP. I'm going to use it to provide theme support for Hype2.

Another site goes live. It should be two by now, but I've so busy that I haven't had a chance to sort out the minor problems on the second project. Anyway, the DMA Membership Microsite is finished, packed with more Javascript cunning than any other site I've built so far. It got very stressful today (and the last two days), we were quite late and it was an important project for the guys who hired me.

The problems we had were due to lack of testing. This seems to be my main problem in terms of site development. At the crunch I get stressed and put the delivery ahead of the quality checking. After the crunch this means that errors often creep in and push the delivery back much further than 15 minutes good testing ever could.

So Netscape is gone, that's bad news for them, but not for Mozilla happily. It will continue apace. Their timing couldn't be better almost. The Mozilla site has been redesigned. The new site is very good. It's simple and usable and it's attractive and very business-like. It seems to be eager to take on the mantle of the challenger that PPK would give it. Moz needs to learn a few lessons from Opera about impressing the suits.

The new site is a big step in the right direction if Mozilla is to climb to the top. In addition, I really think that the totally refactored codebases cut from the main trunk, the children of Moz if you like, Firebird, Thunderbird and Camino, represent the way forward for the newly formed foundation. These products fit into the bigger world of the web much better than the monolithic main product. They are more evolved and much fitter challengers to IE.

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Last updated at 0:35, Monday December 1st, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are GMT.

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