Recently I decided it was time to come up with a refreshed look from my blog. Since I use DotNetNuke to power my blog and my company's site, it meant that I had to build it in the form of a DotNetNuke Skin. Skins are not as simple to design as simple HTML pages, because, among many other things, one has to be knowledgeable enough with what DotNetNuke content tokens generate, and testing is not as simple as you would think.
I had defined a few goals to abide by in the new design, and they were:
- It had to be simple
- It had to be clean
- It had to be CSS layout compliant
- It had to abide by SEO rules
- It had to be light-weight, and finally
- It had to be supported by as many browsers as possible
For the last bullet item in my list of defined goals, I used a great online tool: BrowserShots (www.browsershots.org).
What is BrowserShots? Here is what it is, from the "horse's mouth":
Browsershots makes screen shots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your web site in their browser. Then they will make screen shots and upload them to the central server here.
Once you are ready to test your design for Cross-Browser support, go to www.browsershots.org and select from the multitude of Operating System + Browser permutations, enter your URL and submit it to the queue. Within minutes you will start seeing the result in the form of full-page screen shots (see image below). The only drawback to this (if you can call it that), is that your designs have to be located on an accessible URL (or IP).
For a sampling of the end result here is are the shots that I used for this web site:
http://browsershots.org/http://www.cto20.com/
