Designing Sites In a Sub Directory?

I am dot sure if this is the right forum for this question but I am sure I will get an answer.
I am a web designer and was wondering what the problems might arise with designing a clients website in a sub directory of my main site, So they can view the progress, weather it be a CMS or standard html/css sites.Will it have any negative effects on my site as far search engines go?

You could do that, as long as you don’t mind your work in progress being publicly accessible (i.e. anyone can view the site). Perhaps it’s a good idea to password-protect the directory, so anyone who wants to view it has to enter a username and password? That way search engines and other visitors can’t access it.

Will it have any negative effects on my site as far search engines go?

I don’t really see what the negative effects could be, unless the sites you develop have adult content maybe. Besides, as long as nobody’s liking to those temporary pages, chances are that the search engines won’t find out about their existence anyway.

Search engines only crawl from links they have found or sitemaps. If you are over paranoid you could always limit that directory’s access to the world and either lock it down by user/pass (htaccess/htpwd) or by IP.

You can exclude the directory in your robots.txt file to keep the search engines from indexing it.

Thank you all for your reply’s, sorry I didn’t get back sooner.
I think I will password protect them and add a robots.txt file just and only give access to the client a maximum of three times
during the build process.
Because what I have found is that the clients want to make more and more changes to it if they can see it live as you work on it. I work on my Local testing server (Xampp) before uploading anything so it looks the way i want it live.
I have one client now that is driving me nuts with “minor changes” as they put it. There is no minor changes in web design.
I now see the importance of a clear contract! But I am learning as I go about dealing with clients and the business end of freelance web design.