Best

Designing a website that looks good on the desktop is challenging enough, but these days that’s just the start. If you want to attract the widest possible audience, then your pages will need to work just as well when they’re viewed on an iPad, iPhone, Android tablet or any of the hundreds of other mobile devices – so testing your site’s mobile-readiness can be a complicated and time-consuming business.

Unless, that is, you get a little help from Keynote MITE (Mobile Internet Testing Environment), a free but surprisingly powerful Windows application that comes packed with essential site-checking features. At its simplest, you can see how any URL looks on an iPad, Blackberry, Galaxy S3 or any of more than 2,100 mobile devices out there. It’s really straightforward: just choose your preferred hardware from the library, enter the URL, and in a click you’ll be able to browse the page in an emulated version of that device.

That’s just the start, though. MITE can also check your site to see how well you’ve optimised it for performance, and whether you’re following the best practices for mobile sites, with the program highlighting problems and recommending what you should do next. And if you don’t have time for manual testing, no problem – MITE can record your site navigation actions in a script, replaying them later so your benchmarking becomes almost entirely automatic.

There’s plenty of power here, then, yet despite all this functionality the program remains extremely easy to use. Whether you’re a web development novice or an old hand it’s all very accessible, and there are plenty of essential features to explore.

MITE shows you how your pages look on more than 2,100 mobile devices, highlights problems, can run scripted tests and more – and it’s all for free, says Mike Williams