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Asking for a Site Check or Troubleshooting - Web Design Tutorial
| Brad Halstead September 1, 2001 How many times have you visited a newsgroup forum and asked for a site check only to find that your site doesn't function properly? What kind of response did you receive? Did you get asked a bunch of questions in return?.
Below are some tips on how to ask for a site check or troubleshooting and what you need to do prior to asking. If you do the legwork people WILL be more inclined to offer help on the problem which translates into a better site/page for you! | Validate it!
 | | Have you used a validator on your page to make sure that your HTML and CSS syntax are correct? This is the very first thing you should do prior to asking for a site check or for help in troubleshooting your site. Locations that you can test your pages online and/or offline are located at the following URL's. Bookmark these pages as you should use these with every page that you create prior to starting your troubleshooting if problem occurs. A small note to you is that even if your pages works the way you want it to, you should still validate them to make absolutely sure that there are no syntactical errors in your code. | The Subject
| | All too often people just put 'Site Check' in the subject and a url in the body of their message. This is NOT sufficient in most cases.
The subject MUST be descriptive for people to be able to offer valuable feedback to you. Example of subject lines are: - Site Check: Netscape Layer issue
- Site Check: Site finished Beta, need functionality Check - all browsers
- Site Check: First page only, links not live
As you can see by the samples above, you know the following: - It's a site Check
- Single page or entire site
- If there exists problems and with what
- Browser/platform requests
| The Body
| | Now that we know from your title what you are looking for, here is where you need to be descriptive. A typical request might look similar to this for instance: Hello, I have built my page (http://www.mysite.com/pagename.html) and I would like a site check on this page only for functionality and use of colors. I have been successful in my testing with PC based IE and Netscape 4.X, but would appreciate any critique from Other platform browsers, Opera 5.X and Netscape 6 please. Thank you for your time and critique, it will prove invaluable to me. A typical problem based message might be: Hello. I have run my page (http://www.mysite.com/pagename.htm) through the W3C validator and it passed without issue, however, I have a layer display error (Layer name/ID here) in Netscape 4.X only and I was wondering if someone could preview the page and offer me guidance on how to correct it please. Thank you for your time, I appreciate it. The Layer is supposed to be initially hidden as the page loads and become visible after the page finishes loading, but it is visible all the time instead. | Lessons Learned
| | What have you learned form this? You've learned: - Be descriptive in your message subject line
- Provide a url in the body of the message (If you can't provide a url, then please provide the html page written into the message using copy and paste from your html editing software into the message body)
- Provide information about validation (If you did it, where you did it or what software you used to validate your code)
- Provide steps that you have done to resolve the issue (Did you follow the troubleshooting methods described previously?)
- Provide a complete description of the problem being certain to provide an exact page the problem exists on as well as what the problem is, giving object ID's/names where-ever possible
| Copyright 2001, Brad Halstead, All Rights Reserved |
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