Sitevista Launched

I don't get it ... what service do they provide exactly? Browser checking with screenshots? Sounds to me like a rip off. Is there more to it than that?

Maca: at the moment yes, sitevista provides you with the ability to choose a site, and then choose a number of browsers that you wish to return screen shots in. You then get all these shots back to your personal testing area to review.

Whilst I understand that you probably think this is a "rip off", after all, surely it's just a case of setting up an old mac, and maybe a few virtual pcs? During out pre-launch phase we gave out free accounts to anyone who cared to have a free sample, the response was amazing. A very memorable quote was the designer who told us he had to "ring up his 85 year old grandad and get him to describe his sites on a mac". It may come as a surprise to learn that people are actually willing to pay for a service they could have setup themselves, just to save themselves the hard work and time.

As a designer himself, Paul created sitevista because he thought he could make already existing services simpler and more beautiful, the response tells us he's on the way to achieving that, now we want users to tell us how to build the product further. We've already started to add new features such as a screen reader mp3 download of your site, with more accessibility tests on the way.

Maca, any ideas on what you think we should do to make the service better?

David, first off, I hope you weren't offended by my comments, no offence was intended, sincerely!!
It just sounded to me like a lot to pay, especially when browsers are free and any designer worth his/her salt should have all major browsers installed.

Having said that I only have Windows and would be curious how my site looks on Tiger, BeOS etc etc ... whether i'd be willing to pay for it or not is a different matter entirely :)

Any ideas? ... you could consider code validation (many people don't know about or can't use the W3C validators), checking it with Bobby etc. Or even offer design/coding critiques/debugging advice??? Or you could add tests to show what a site is like with images disabled or javascript disabled (as many people don't actually know that up to 10% of surfers disable javascipt).
Maybe not great ideas but i'd have to give it a bit more thought .. ...

No offence taken Maca, I'm just keen to answer comments as they arise :-)

The W3C validation is a good idea, and I'm glad to say that Paul is offering himself to help with compatibility problems .

Images disabled and javascript disabled is a good one, we try to keep things as simple as possible. Therefore we would tend not add so many options that people can request shots in 8 different browsers with a picture for normal, no images and no javascript for each. We'd rather prefer to just have "images disabled" and "javascript disabled" shots coming back from one particular browser (Firefox?).
One thing we're keen to do is make things simple, there isn't enough of that on the web.

Yeah, I know what you mean, no point having too many options anyway or you'll just confuse the shit out of people ... if you excuse my French.

You could always offer "additional tests" or "advanced tests" or something like that, perhaps at extra cost

If I (i'm no pro btw) was analyzing a site for example, these are the sort of things I might check (where possible)
- browser & platform compatability
- web standards (& obsolete code check for example)
- accessibility
- download speeds
- javascript & images
- image sizes (ties in with download speeds I guess)
- code optimization (especially for Frontpage users)
- Meta tags
- date of last update (some value that)
- broken links
- spelling errors

p.s. if I can be of any further help [suggestions, brain storming, moral support :) ] feel free to mail me (via my blog).

if you get yourself down to the sitevista blog, we're always looking for people to join in our debates on product ideas. www.sitevista.com/blog