The Wrong Advices

Why would you want to set up a redirect?

To preserve search engine ranking on a page which has moved.
If your website has moved to a new domain.
To redirect incoming visitors to www.yourdomain.com instead of yourdomain.com, or vice versa.

The last point is the one I want to address in a little more detail, as it [...]

For a long time I used to code on the fly, downloading files, making changes, then reuploading them to the server. It’s a nauseatingly slow way of doing things and if you make a mistake somewhere you’ve just killed your website.
So when I started getting serious about developing I switched to a local development environment. For most [...]