New Site "Version": approaches and tricks

Hello all

I’m running WP as a CMS and currently have something like 110 pages of information. I’m struggling to organise this and want to re-engineer my site a little. It’s not a question of coding or new versions of WP, rather how can I do some of this offline?

Ideally, I’d like to work on the page hierarchy, build a new menu to go with it and have these ready to switch over, so that there isn’t a period of perhaps a day or two where things are all over the place.

Is there a way I can “freeze” the site for public users and work on the changes by myself? Can I work on a custom menu system without making that public? Would it be better to re-create the site locally, do the changes and migrate that version to live? Finally, is it possible to package up data, files, settings all together and simply roll this to another site with a different URL?

Someone here must have worked on a new site version and switched over to it rather than build in public view. Does anyone have any tips?

Thanks

Ben