Testing Your Work with the Dreamweaver CS3 Site Reporting Feature

The Dreamweaver CS3 Site Reporting feature enables you to find — and fix — site problems before you go live with your Web site. You can create a variety of reports and even customize them to identify problems with external links, redundant and empty tags, untitled documents, and missing Alt text. You can easily miss things — especially when you work on a tight deadline — and what you miss can cause real problems for your viewers.

Before Dreamweaver added this great new feature, finding these kinds of mistakes was a tedious and time-consuming task. Now you can run a report that identifies these errors for you and use Dreamweaver to correct mistakes across your entire site automatically.

Follow these steps to produce a Site Report of your entire Web site:

1. In the drop-down list at the top of the Files panel, select the site name. In the list that appears, select the site you want to work on.

2. Make sure all your open documents are saved by choosing File --> Save All.

3. Choose Site --> Reports.

The Reports dialog box appears.

4. In the Report On drop-down list, choose Entire Current Local Site.

You can also choose to check only a single page by opening the page in Dreamweaver and then choosing Current Document in the Report On drop-down list.

5. In the Select Reports section, select the reports you want.

The different types of reports and the information they give you are outlined in the list that follows these steps. You can select as many reports as you want.

The Workflow options in the Select Reports section are available only if you already enabled Check In/Out in the Remote Info section of the Site Definition dialog box and selected Maintain Design Notes in the Design Notes section of the Site Definition dialog box's Advanced tab.

6. Click the Run button to create the report(s).

If you haven't already done so, you may be prompted to save your file, define your site, or select a folder.

The Results panel displays a list of problems found on the site. You can sort the list by different categories (filename, line number, or description) by clicking the corresponding column headings.

7. Double-click any item in the Results panel to open the corresponding file in the Document window.

You can also right-click (Windows) or Control+click (Mac) any line of the report and choose More Info to find additional details about the specific error or condition.

8. Use the Property inspector or another Dreamweaver feature to correct the identified problem and then save the file.

Dreamweaver can create all sorts of reports. In the Select Reports section (see Step 5), you can choose any or all of the following reports:

• Checked Out By lists files checked out of the site and identifies the person who checked them out.

• Design Notes lists Design Notes used in the site.

• Recently Modified lists files that have been edited within a specified time period. You can set the time period for the report by selecting the Recently Modified check box and then clicking the Report Settings button at the bottom of the dialog box.

• Combinable Nested Font Tags lists all instances where you can combine nested tags.

• Accessibility lists possible accessibility issues in a wide variety of categories. To specify what this report checks, select the Accessibility check box and then click the Report Settings button at the bottom of the dialog box.

• Missing Alt Text lists all the image tags that do not include Alt text. Alt text is important to anyone who uses a special browser that reads Web pages.

• Redundant Nested Tags lists all places where you have redundant nested tags.

• Removable Empty Tags lists the empty tags on your site. Empty tags can occur when you delete an image, text section, or other element without deleting all the tags applied to the element.

• Untitled Documents lists filenames that don't have a title. The title tag, which specifies the text that appears at the very top of the browser window, is easy to forget because it doesn't appear in the body of the page.

dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/testing-your-work-with-the-dreamweaver-cs3-site-re.html