Site Redesign While Still Live

[Caged]

I am wanting to do a complete redesign of my current site but I really don't want to put my visitors on hold while I do this. My question is what would be the best way instead of putting my main index in a subfolder and building from that subfolder? I would like to have it load my homepage on entering the url in the browser instead of a redirect to a subfolder. And building on my homeserver and then uploading will really be a headache changing paths and db variables. Any suggestions?

[Mr. Brownstone]

. . . And building on my homeserver and then uploading will really be a headache changing paths and db variables. Any suggestions?

But it is by far the best way of doing things. You can also put in an if ... then conditional statement which detects if you are running the site locally, or on your remote host. Just detect something like “localhost” in the script-name — Request.ServerVariables ( 'SCRIPT_NAME' ) — and feed it the correct paths & DB parameters accordingly. I use this method myself, and never have to touch the configuration after setting it once.

[redux]

why not set up a separate development home server (running on a different port, for instance) with its root set to the root of the site you're currently working on ? that way, you can build a mirror of your live site quite easily whilst running locally, and still keep your normal home server with it's various subdirectories.

just my GBP0.02

(p.s.: moved this to a more appropriate forum)

[midnight9]

Take this into consideration before you get too far along in your planning:

http://www.uie.com/Articles/quiet_death_of_relaunch.htm

[LavernGingerich]

How do you show your client samples if you do all the design offline?