Build It - Uploading and Validating: University of Leicester Web Centre

3. Build it

Uploading and validating

Summary
With your site in an almost finished state it's time to upload it to the Web and then run it through the various validation procedures that it will need to pass before it can go 'live' - namely Accessibility, Corporate Identity Download PDF and HTML Validation

Uploading your site to the Web

No amount of testing your site locally on your own machine will preclude the need to test it 'live' on the Web (the main University server in the case of most internal University sites).

Live testing on the Web usually immediately highlights any badly linked resources, images, hyperlinks by causing them to stop working. This usually causes mild panic but is ultimately a positive thing to have found out as you can fix it and re-test.

In very general terms, to upload files to the Web, you'll need to have an area/folder on the Web somewhere, which you have access to/ownership of and which you have all the details for including the full host Web address, hostname, any required username and passwords.

Most Web packages have a facility for uploading files to the Web and its usually into this tool that you enter the details mentioned above. With the details entered you need to 'connect' to the Web and access your area/folder. Then its usually just a case of dragging and dropping your site over or hitting an upload button.

The following tutorials cover uploading your site:

Tutorial name	Dreamweaver MX 2004	FrontPage 2003	FrontPage 2000
Uploading files to the Web (05/11/04)	PDF 118KB	PDF 215KB	PDF 046KB

Validating your site

There's a core group of things you need to test for once your site is 'live' and hopefully you may already have done some browser compatibility testing during your creation of the site. Regardless, now is the time to crash test your site to see if it's got problems and if it has fix them before drawing people's attention to the new site.

Things to test for include:

Is the site Valid HTML? The W3C HTML validator is perfect for this purpose. Visit http://validator.w3.org to try your site.
Is your CSS valid? The W3C CSS validator will check your style sheets for errors. Visit http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator to try your style sheets.
Does your site meet Accessibility requirements? Run it through the Watchfire WebXACT service and find out: http://webxact.watchfire.com
This service also checks 'quality' and 'privacy' of your Web pages. The minimum acceptable level of Accessibility preparedness is 'Priority 1' - it's up to you if you want to be even more adherent.
Does your site meet with the University of Leicester's Corporate Identity regulations and the Internet Code of Practice?
Check your site again for cross-browser/platform support by viewing it on as many alternate machines as possible. If you've adhered to the other criteria like validity and Accessibility then comparatively you shouldn't have many problems.
Check your site for broken links.

The following tutorials cover aspects of validating your site:

Tutorial name	Dreamweaver MX 2004	FrontPage 2003	FrontPage 2000
Broken links and error checking (05/11/04)	PDF 108KB	PDF 093KB	PDF 030KB

The University has a broken link checking facility available at:

http://www.le.ac.uk/cwis/brokenlinks/

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