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Testing your theme
This is possibly the most important part of designing a theme for your blog. After all, what is the point of making a theme that most people have trouble reading?
I made the point before that incompatible colours can make it difficult for some sections of your readership. That isn’t your only problem. Although most users have Internet Explorer as their default browser, there are different versions which render websites differently. So your theme can work beautifully in IE7, but parts of your design can seemingly disappear on IE6. Other readers use different browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera; and Mac users will most likely use Safari.
Many of the most glaring errors may be solved simply by validating your code. W3 has its own validation service which checks any page you choose from your website for errors in its HTML source. (As a sidenote, it is also worth making your code semantically valid XHTML.) You should also validate your CSS stylesheets, and you can do that at the W3 website too.
It is also very tricky to make your design work exactly as you intended on every browser in current existence, so getting your design to look reasonably well in the major browsers is an achievement in itself. Thus testing as many browsers as possible is very much worth your while. Browsershots offers a free service to view how your site is expected to appear in the most popular browsers, but your theme can only be tested by Browsershots if you have uploaded and activated your theme.
