SiteVista
Last week an interesting new service for web designers named sitevista launched. From their blog:
SiteVista is a service that gives you, amongst other things, screen captures of your web pages in different browsers.
I had the pleasure of meeting Paul at reboot7 and got a promotional key for the beta, so i already had some time to play around with it. As noted, sitevista is a service for testing your website in different browsers, resolutions and color depths. You submit your site url, select the tests you’d like to run and sitevista returns screen captures of the results, which look something like this cropped sample:
Screen captures of the tested page are available in window- and fullpage-format. Window screen captures show the page as displayed inside the browser and end with the fold. Fullpage screen captures show the full page rendered from header to footer. If my description doesn’t make much sense to you i’d suggest checking out sitevista’s demo video.
Through sitevista i’ve learned that my site is ugly but usable in internet explorer 5.5 and 5, usable but unstyled in netscape navigator 4 and seriously broken in internet explorer 4, which i’m perfectly comfortable with as these problems stem from lacking standards compliance in these browsers rather than any deficiencies on my end. Testing with these browsers myself would have been challenging to say the least, as it’s not exactly easy to get several different versions of internet explorer installed on one machine.
The most interesting features aren’t live yet, however. Imho the two most interesting features to come are mp3 recordings of your pages visited using a screen reader and tests which show how your pages appear to people with color blindness. Really interesting and particularly difficult to test on your own.
With its current feature-set and pricing i’m not sure i could justify signing up myself right now, but that’s mostly because i’m no web designer and have only limited use for a service like sitevista. However as a full-time web designer i’d definitely check out their service (one day access costs $9) as i find their monthly plans very competitively priced and quite possibly worth it if you have a lot of browser-testing to do.
Christoph - Thanks for the review! Fingers crossed, the screen reader and colour blindness tests should be ready in the next few weeks. I’m really pleased you enjoyed using it.
Paul.
Comment by Paul Farnell on Jul. 15th, 2005, at 11:13 #