Setting up proper website development environment?

I'm assigned basic tasks to update my company's website. At my disposal I have 3 drives for: development, staging and production. So far I have made a few updates to the site directly in the production server (to my superior's request because of immediacy) and used an "updatenow.txt" file copied into the production server to make it go live.

I realize this is horrible development practice method and would like to setup a proper dev environment. I'm pretty much aimless at this point (noob) and I am the only developer on my team. Would all I need to do be: do all development in one of the other servers (besides production) and use the same "updatenow.txt" file method to push it live from that server and then figure out the web address for that server to view the changes?