An important part of web site design and development is web site testing. You need to know what your web site users experience. You need to know the good and the bad. You need to know what works and what doesn't, and when you find the errors in your website you need to know how to fix them.

Website testing has many levels of complexity and many phases in the time course of your website design and development. There is the easy testing, such as ensuring there are no broken links. There is the content browsing, making sure that content is correct and does not need to be changed. There is the testing of navigation, ease of use and web site usability in general.

Among the more complicated levels of testing is with the dynamic web pages, whether they are fed by a database, a query string or a form. Server errors are more difficult to fix for many reasons. There may be an error in the syntax. There may be an error with the database query. And there may be an error with the logic in general. Some of these errors are easy to fix, but some can take hours to fix.

Some website errors are not even evident and you have to rely on the log files of your website statistics to tell you that a server error was experienced. A good idea is to do a lot of testing and also to have some friends or colleagues test out the site. You should try using the site in ways you normally would but also should try to find and make the site have errors; that way you can correct them and more likely make your site error-proof.

It's important to start website testing early on. The first page that is designed needs to be tested adequately, in terms of HTML, Javascript, links, navigation, usability, organization and scalability. The first page you develop on your web site may turn into a building block for pages to come. Make sure it's designed and developed for the long term because later any updates you want to make to the structure and design of this page or any errors that are discovered later on this web page will have to be corrected across multiple pages; that's just a pain in the butt. Thus, be sure to test a lot and to start the website testing process as soon as you start the web development and web design itself.