Building a Website Offline

By far, the best first step you can take to building and hosting a website online is to create a fully navigable version of your site offline. There are a number of reasons for doing this:

Test pages ~ Assuming that you are using relative addressing in your HTML source code, you can test your website offline to make sure that all images and text on your web pages are displaying properly and all the internal links (hyperlinks leading from one page on your website to another page on your website) are fully functional. Testing your pages offline can also help save bandwidth and preserve all your web stats for 'real' visitors.

Stay organized ~ Working offline by default establishes an important routine where you can make it a hard and fast rule to never edit the online versions of your web pages. Instead, always edit the offline version and then upload them to overwrite the online versions.

If you don't follow this routine then you could run into some problems should you, for example, decide to edit the online version without remembering to make the same changes to the offline version. What could happen then is that later on you may decide to do the opposite, i.e. edit the offline version and then upload it and unwittingly overwrite the previously edited online version. Hence, if you don't establish a steady routine for updating files then you could make some irreversible mistakes. Believe me, I've learned this the hard way.

And this leads to the next reason why you should work offline:

Backup files ~ An offline version of your website acts as a back up to the online version (and vice-versa). This will exist as a kind of failsafe should anything happen to your online web files. And you never know what might happen, for instance you could accidentally delete some online files or your web host could suddenly go bankrupt and go out of business overnight without even telling you (yes, this happens) or any number of mishaps that could corrupt or change your online webpages beyond recovery. Better safe than sorry. Right?

Alright then, the best and simplest way to organize your web files so that the exact same files work both offline and online is to use...

That's right, you guessed it:   Relative Addressing.