Revamping website

Hello,

I'm looking to update my company website from 7.0 to 7.1. Although, I will also be revamping the website with our new brand identity. Am I able to work on the template, offline, beforehand and then migrate the new web design to the domain? 

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks in advance.

If you use the update tool to move to 7.1 you can do a limited amount of changes to the design without it being live, but in my experience it's not enough to get a website "launch ready", so you would need to build in some down time or accept a transition period as you update.

The procedure before having this tool was to redesign the website from scratch on a clean slate and then transfer over the domain when you were finished but this is a lengthy process and you do lose analytics and have to set up any store items and the sales tools again. 

You can always test this yourself by duplicating your website and trying the update tool before you do it on your live website.