Benefits of making updates on local machine

[sodani]

I have about a dozen websites, some are wordpress, some are on drupal, none with any serious traffic. The way that I have been making updates is to edit the files locally on a text editor and then uploading the files via ftp and seeing if the desired change is live on the web.

However, I often hear about people doing updates on a local web server. What is the benefit of this, and can I start doing this easily? I have a plain old dell pc and do not know linux. Are there any articles that could help me out in learning more about this?

Thanks in advance.

[mack]

If you have an old pc then you could certainly set up a LAN test server. I posted a thread a while back explaining how to go about this.

[webmasterworld.com...]

The main advantage of testing locally is you notice all errors before the changes go live. I would recommend having a test environment to any serious web developer. It does not need to be a LAN server, it could simple be a server installed on your PC.

Mack.