Test, test and test some more

Oh I was livid with myself yesterday. I'd worked on a hellish site that wasn't our own and that had been inherited. A total mess really, both front and, as I'm reliably informed by my developer colleague, back end. I was charged with re-designing areas of the site whereas I would dearly have loved to have re-designed and built the whole thing, as would my developer colleague.

What has caused me to cringe inwardly and will do for days to come, was that I'd made a couple of 'minor' adjustments to some pages which I'd foolishly assumed would look the same in Firefox as they appeared in IE. I therefore can't have tested these changes in Firefox before the site went live. Embarassingly it was a safari user who noticed a problem. I'd simply set a border in a stylesheet to zero - an act you would think would be pretty inocuous, but it had extended a table column so that it no longer appeared the same width as its neighbours. I burn with shame. It was immediately fixed (although I have still to work out exactly why that act caused the table to break in that way), but nonetheless an embarassment. Grrr. A lesson learned, I guess. However pressured and rushed you might be to get a site up live and however distracted by parallel projects, get into a routine of test test test again (repeats over and over to self).