I use WAMP on a PC, and I think MAMP is available for mac, though have never used it.
WAMP can be downloaded from http://www.wampserver.com/en/
and read the sticky posts at http://forum.wampserver.com/list.php?2
It has been years since I did, but Googling “using WAMP” or “using WAMP to develop WordPress locally” or something similar will probably bring up some good articles. Just be careful to use recently dated posts for up to date info.
There are other more advanced methods, but this is a good way to start.
You should be able to use a backup plugin to move your site to the server.
Best of luck, it’s an interesting learning process
FYI –
Subdomain is http://subdomain.domain.com
just a folder in your hosting.
Localhost is the term giving to a folder on your computer that serves webpages.
WAMP, MAMP, XAMP are all programs that contain Apache, PHP, SQL and everything needed to set up a web server on your local machine.
You need a server environment to run PHP files, which is what WordPress is built on.
Once installed, you would see your WordPress site at http://localhost/wordpress
To move the site to the live server when complete, you would have to use a Backup plugin to make a backup of the site and database.
You would then copy that file to the new server, restore the database and website.
If the backup/restore plugin does not do it for you, you would need a database utility to change the url from localhost to the domain name.
I use Akeeba backup, it does the job very well.
The biggest problem in changing URLs in the DB from localhost to the proper domain name are any references in serialized data. A simple search and replace will corrupt the serialized data schema. If you use a DB utility to do this, be sure it properly handles serialized data.
One way to avoid the whole localhost replacement thing is to add www.thecornishtinyhouse.uk to your local hosts file, mapped to 127.0.0.1. (with and without the www.) Then you can setup your new WP install using the proper domain name from the start. When the DB is migrated to the production server, it’s ready to go.
The one problem with the hosts domain name scheme is you cannot access the real production site with that domain name, you need to get there through the site’s IP address and often with the hosting account reference appended. Or visit through another computer.
