The mother of all stupid newby questions

[Timbow]

I want to switch my site from an html site, built with Frontpage and looks it, to a CMS site using getsimple. Question: can I play with it & build it, test it, etc, while my original site goes along as before? In other words, is there a "go live" switch on these things?

Just build your site in a sub directory

Or you can build it locally on your desktop by creating the right environment with PHP and apache. Easy with windows, don't know about other OSs.