I am in the process of setting up my first website and wanted to start uploading my pages to a server soon. However, I wanted to test them on the server and make sure that everyone involved with the project was happy before any search engines crawl the page.

My question is, if I don't submit the page to Google, Yahoo and other search engines do I need to worry about them crawling my page or do I need to setup an htcacess file to keep them at bay?

If no one links to you and you don't tell the search engines then no one knows you exist so test away.

do I need to worry about them crawling my page or do I need to setup an htcacess file to keep them at bay?

To be safe, set them up in folders just for testing - then move the files to the main area. After all, there's various ways google can find a link to your site, eg your own carelessness. HTaccess is a bad idea because then if it gets crawled google has it pegged as blocked, and you have to wait for it to recrawl and who knows whether you'll get unlucky about the time delay. Leaving it as it is and taking a risk is also bad, simply because it is careless, unprofessional and shoddy.

This is a trivial question worth far less ascii than I have dedicated to it. I couldn't ever see myself ever having asked such trivial questions anywhere on my journey to development expertise... I think you need to try and rely more on your mind and more on your own drive and less on the (often incorrect) advice of those in an arena (social media / consumer generated media) with over 75% deceptive messages, written with the primary purpose of selling in mind.

even if you're careless it will probably take google more than a week to index your site, so if you can get everything done within that time you won't have a problem

Robots.txt should keep the spiders away from the test areas, and then just transfer agreed-upon content from the test folders into the final resting place on the site.