Enabling Clean URLs on website-in-progress I host my site and a few others through Hostgator. When I build a new Drupal site as a replacement for an existing site at a different host, I build it on the IP address (192.xxx.xxx.xxx/~username) or on the corrado (Hostgator) url (corrado.websitewelcome.com/username). In both cases, I cannot activate Drupal's "Clean URLs" feature. Once the site is built and we are ready to point the domain name to the new site (and we do so), Clean URLs works fine. It is an issue, though, while I am still building the site, because I have to use absolute URLs in the CSS and the various content blocks for the links and images to work correctly, and that creates extra work during the website activation process where I have to go back in and remove all of those absolute URLs. I have tried modifying my hosts file so that the site's existing URL will resolve to the Hostgator IP address for that new site-in-progress, but this isn't enough to "fool" the Clean URLs function.

I already reached out to Hostgator support, and they did not have a solution for me. Any ideas on how I can work around this issue and get Clean URLs to work in this environment?
You can use relative css as long as you are pointing to files within your theme. That will work like this. url('img/image.jpg'); So no need for full url's here.

More explanation here: http://css-tricks.com/quick-reminder-about-file-paths/

At template level you might want to use drupal_get_path to point to the various modules and or themes.