I am presently using RapidWeaver to rebuild an old website that was originally produced using Apple iWeb.
My strategy is to produce an essentially identical website using a separate URL name, then when everything looks happy, change the temporary name to the original name and load it onto the URL location the first website now resides at. I realize I will likely need to do a bunch of re-directs etc, but that is manageable.
My question is about general strategy.
Can you simply duplicate a website and republish it with a different name or would you instead change the name publishing credentials of the test site and re-publish using the original website FTP credentials?
I would:
Create a subdomain on your host (NOT a folder in the current domain) to publish the new site to while you work on it. That way you can lock it down from the public and search engine bots using a .htaccess rule or something like Pagesafe from @joeworkman.
Build your new site and publish to that subdomain.
When it’s ready to go, Back up your old site, remove it from the server.
Change the site name/url and publishing settings in RW and publish to the old domain.