When designing a new website for a client, here are a couple of workflows for designing the website on a subdomain before migrating it to the final domain when it's ready to go live.
Strategy #1 - Use a subdomain on your domain
In this workflow, you will create a new subdomain for your client on your own website's domain. Ex: myclient.mydesignbiz.com Once the design is complete, you move the customer's website to their domain. A lot of full time designers use this workflow.
What you need to do is have a Total CMS license that is dedicated to your domain. This license will be used for all of the client sites under development. Each has their own subdomain. Once you move the site to their own domain, you will need to get a new license for the client's final production website.
This means that you have an upfront cost for a license for your domain. However, you may already be using Total CMS on your website for a blog. By leveraging the license on your domain, you do not need to purchase a license for your client's domain until it's ready to go live. This could be a big benefit if the design takes a long time to finalize, or if the client leaves before the site ever goes live.
Strategy #2 - Use a subdomain on your client's domain
In this workflow, you will create a new subdomain for your client on their domain. Ex: dev.myclient.com Once the design is complete, you move the customer's website to the main domain.
You will use a license for your clients domain during the entire process. When the site moves to the client's main domain, you don't need to change the license since it's still applicable to the main domain.
Remember that you do have 30 days to use Total CMS without a license. You will need to license the CMS before the trial ends or else Total CMS will no longer save any data.
Strategy #3 - Use MAMP locally to design your site
MAMP Pro allows you to assign a domain locally. This gives us a lot of flexibility with using Total CMS licenses. You can create a subdomain of your clients website locally and use their license. OR... you can use a dev license for your own and then create a bunch of subdomains for each of your clients locally. Check out this live stream for more details...