You can make it a child portal of your primary site depending on how you view your current local site (i.e. http://localhost/newsite) or you can make it a primary (i.e. http://thiswebsite.com) and change your WINS file so that you system looks at your local server instead of trying to find it on the internet or you can do both - a portal can have multiple aliases

I want to create a completely different website. I guess that means I want to create another portal. If I make the new portal a child then my new web site is not independent because it has a parent which is from the existing portal. Let say if I have two different customers and I want to run their websites on my local machine for testing purposes. How would I do that? Don't I create two portals each with the files stored in \dotnetnuke\website1 and \dotnetnuke\website2? Thx