Testing sites as you’re creating them — tips?

[Brett]

Question for designers, about your workflow as you create your sites. Do you:

– Upload to a test directory on your server, like "public_html/mysite-test" and point the domain (and hope it’s not prematurely seen or crawled)
– As above, but password-protect to keep search bots out
– Use MAMP or local test server
– Then, upload the finished site to a "final" folder, re-point the domain, direct Google to your sitemap.xml, and "go live"?[/list:u]

I tend to upload to the site’s

actual, final directory, so I can check image links etc. If I’m worried it’ll get crawled before all the content/pagenames/descriptions/seo are in place, I just password-protect the directory. Then when I’m ready, I un-protect the directory, point Google, and let it go.

What are your workflows in this regard? Very interested to hear.

Brett

[Rob MacKay]

I personally do everything locally – then upload once its finished :)

I use XAMPP a lot.

[Chris Coyier]

I like to rock subdomains, like, dev.the-website.com

[Brett]

if anyone can rock a subdomain, Chris, it’s you.

How does that affect Google etc pre-crawling the site if you’re not ready? Or does that not really matter?

Brett

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