Design a site and work in a Localhost?

With a CMS like Drupal, go with a LocalHost - it is faster
and you also won't "break" your site when working on it.
That's the main advantage.

I think the original question was about WordPress - Drupal is an advanced Content Management System (CMS), sort of a competitor to WordPress (although WordPress isn't in the same league as Drupal) .

To answer your original question, I use a local LINUX server (Ubuntu 9.04 running on a P4 with 1GB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive) and I develop all my sites on it first, using both WordPress and Joomla (another CMS). I then transfer everything onto the target server once I'm sure it all works - it's a matter of transferring files , backing up and restoring the database(s) and adjusting a few configuration files.

Building on your own host (your own server or WAMPP) has a lot of advantages whe you are "experimnting" with different configuratons, it also helps you get the optimum file permissions set. There are a couple of tihngs you can't do on the local host, such as Google Maps or PayPal IPN stuff, but for the majority of work its a real time saver.

Having WAMPP on your notebook allows you to have all your development tools in one place - it's also the only way I know of to work on your web site during a long plane trip!

Bill

I do everything for a Wordpress theme on a localhost first. I use xampp myself. I get everything apart from the actual posts going offline first. Although, I'll do some test posts to make sure everything is formatted well.

If I'm setting up content myself, I normally do that online. Given that adding posts has to be done one way or another, I prefer to do it online. Then I don't have the extra task of duplicating the databse and the uploads folder.

I too work with Drupal in localhost (also using XAMPP) and in fact, I generally have several sites in development, all sharing a single Drupal codebase. In addition, I have a "sandbox" site, used for high level experimentation. - Go live when you're good and ready to minimize the "embarassment factor".

Havn't used Wordpress, but I believe it's PHP & MySql based, which is a perect fit for any LAMP, WAMP, MAMP stack - Bill & Kezz havit it right...

I work with Wordpress on localhost.
It's really fast - when I work in Expression Web I only CTRL+S my templates and preview them in Wordpress - the experience is the same as working on static HTML and I can start designing already inside the CMS>

Also it's really fast to setup new sites - I setup 5-10 new sites in about 20 minutes and my employees put in the content while I code the templates

If you want to work in a localhost while you are developing your website, you can use EasyPhp. You can make PHP webpages and view them locally, and once you are done, upload them to your website.
Link : http://www.easyphp.org/

Does anyone know whether I need to uninstall MAMP in order to cleanly install XAMPP? This is specifically for WordPress running locally on Mac (PPC) OS X 10.5.8. I am a newbie. I am using a WordPress plugin for building templates and MAMP seem to have a bit of a conflict with it, so I need to move to XAMPP. Also, once I install XAMPP, would I need to reinstall WordPress? Would appreciate your thoughts!

Using XAMPP Lite when doing my wordpress themes. Haven't tried anything else though, and haven't had the need for it either...