How to test a site before going live

[heathh67181329]

Hello,

I'm an absolute newbie to Business Catalyst, but have done some WordPress in the past. A friend has a website hosted by Business Catalyst, and has asked me to see if I could help him change the menus/navigation and a few other minor things. (He normally goes through pros for this, but they were charging way to much so figured he'd give me a shot).

Anyway, I've watched some tutorials, and have a pretty good idea how to make the change that needs to happen.

What I don't understand, is how to actually make the changes, and test them out, before the site goes live. I think the ideal situation would be to have the test site at a live url so that my friend can go and verify it looks ok, and then push the code to the live server.

Is that how the normal workflow works?  I saw there was an option to make a test site clone of an existing site.  Is that what I'm supposed to do?  And then once I get the test site working the way I want, somehow merge that back to the live site?

Is there a FAQ or walkthrough of how this sort of thing is supposed to be done?

[Ussnorway]

does your pal have a dreamweaver or Muse made website?

if we assume Muse for now then the 'publish' buttion will make a test site on busness catalyst that can be linked to and run your tests on but won't have any dns renaming (i.e, yoursite.com instead of yoursite.businesscatalyst.com) or font kits and can't be seen by search engines until its fully launched.

after testing your client can launch the site on BC for all the normal things and start paying for whatever hosting plan floots their boat.

in DW, there is no publish buttion because it is assumed that DW users know code and don't need a simple buttion but otherwise the same option apply when host is Adobe BC.

to be clear, you also have the option to host outside Adobe BC with these products but we are talking about Adobe BC here.