Develop and test your site on a local machine first. Installing Joomla locally is not as hard as it may sound, and the exercise will greatly boost your confidence.</li>
Be able to roll back to an earlier version of your site using a modern version control system, such as CVS, Subversion, or git.</li> The Eclipse IDE indicated above includes a Subversion plugin. This allows you to work with the Joomla! source repository as well as other projects hosted on JoomlaCode.