Whether you are designing a one-page basic HTML site or are developing a slightly more complicated site that uses JavaScript and jQuery functions, you need to thoroughly test the design and functionality before putting the HTML/CSS/JS files on a live web server.

How do you test the files associated with your project?

If you are a professional web designer /developer, you’ve probably set up a local server to test the sites on the computer itself but the workflow is a little more tedious for the rest of us.

You write the code in a local folder, then upload the associated files to a FTP server and finally, you load these online files in a browser for testing – this code-upload-test cycle may have to repeated multiple time until your site works as expected.

Test your Local Website with Dropbox

There is however an easier way as well that should save you some time.

If you can move your local development folder to the Dropbox public folder, you don’t have to worry about uploading files to an FTP server as Dropbox will do that for you.

As soon as you change code in the local file, the changes get uploaded online to Dropbox servers almost immediately and you can use the “public link” in Dropbox to open and test that file in your web browser. Dropbox can understand relative URLs and hence your associated JS and CSS files will also get picked up without you having to specify the full path.

In other words, you code websites on a local computer but test them online just like the real environment. This technique may however not be used for testing PHP and other non-HTML sites.

Also see: How to Completely Test your Website