It’s more a question of which method of development best suits the way you work and the systems you work on, rather than which is better than the other.

I tend to develop the early stages in MAMP (simply because deployments of WP and Joomla are already available) – normally the template stuff. There comes a point where you inevitably find yourself creating sections of content layout for testing (articles, posts, sidebar data, modules, plugins), and it’s at this point where I find myself setting up on a live server to save duplicate work.

You can, of course, develop fully on a local environment before transferring to a live server – but as you say, you do need to work on correcting the permalinks (in WP) although this is easy enough to overcome (plenty of guides on Google for doing this in a pain-free way).

I think beyond the initial template work, working on a live server is the preferable way since the client can see the progress, and quite often I collaborate with 3rd parties at this stage, who will also need access to the site administrator.

As for the domain choice, what you’ve described is similar to how I work – you can also protect subdomains with .htpasswd during development for added security.

Remember if you develop in a subdomain you will still need to change the permalink structure in WP when you move to live.

This is sort of related to your post… I am trying to decide if it is better for me to develop my sites locally or in a testing area in a live web server.

I am already using MAMP / local and it all works fine. The problem is that a) I can’t show my client the website as I make progress for feedback and b) if I need assistance from wp or wpec they can help more on live sites.

Reason for not choosing live to start with was because I was told it was really slow and that moving from a testing area (see below how I was thinking of doing it) mucks up the permalinks. I have been told recently that using something like Coda makes it really easy to develop live.

The system I was thinking of using live would be:

Secure a domain purely for testing: mycompanytest.com

Build sites under: clientsite.mycompany.com

Then move the sites once complete to:

clientsite.com

Is this something that would work? Sorry, have been trolling through the web trying to find some more info on this with not much luck.

Thanks!