Hi all
 
I would like to try out a new design on my site, but without affecting the current design, if you know what I mean...? ;)
 
I could work with the alternative CSS to my current design (Silver Dark <=> Silver Light) but everytime I would switch to see how it looks, all those browsing my page will see my experimenting as well. I do not want to go "live" until I'm happy with the new design.
 
Do any of you have a good idea how I can easily set up a "test" page/mode - pointing to the alternative CSS?
 
Roger

The ideal way to do this is by using a local server on your local computer and setting up a test copy of your production site on it.
 
Apache servers with PHP are freely available for most platforms and there are several tools making the administration easy.
 
Which computer operating system do you use?

If you use Stylizer, you can set the css to save locally. That's how I do this currently, then when I'm ready to take it live, I change the save settings to FTP.

Thanks for the suggestions, but they were too complicated for me ;)
I'm not so tech savvy, so I did it like this:
I used PageSucker to download a static version of the site - this allowed me to play with the CSS file and check it against the different kind of pages.
At least I could tweak the basic design offline (but I still have to adjust the blocks online).

NTM!
 
Thnaks for the tip of Stylizer! This will be my CSS first aid kit. Great, easy to use and fast workflow software...
 
Why dont everyone use this?

Good looks on the Stylizer rec.. I'm going to purchase it :)

Hi, Dont know if you sorted your problems.
 
But theres a free opensource program called uniform server. php, mysql etc all included. just download and press start server and your away.
 
Great way to test and play around will your website offline.
 
Very easy to setup, just a few clicks then you can test your website offline localy and its free.

I've had a look at the stylizer site - looks very good and not expensive - seems like an obvious tool to have!
 
Chris

I have added an extra site just for testing stuff
 
e.g
 
yourdomain.com/livesite
 
yourdomian.com/testsite
 
You could try things out on the test site and when happy use the same css for the live site.
 
This works well for me ! and it only takes 5 mins to set up.
 
Dave

Sorry forgot to mention that for speed I use the following to copy the whole directory of the live site into a second directory. I then set up a additional site in Viart with the same page settings as the live site and away you go for testing.
 
This is specifically for Linux / Unix users
 
To copy a directory with all subdirectories and files use the Linux / Unix cp command. Below is an example command of how you would use the cp command to copy files.
 
cp -r /home/hope/files/* /home/hope/backup
 
In the above example the cp command would copy all files, directories, and subdirectories in the /home/hope/files directory to the /home/hope/backup directory