Doing your own wordpress website

loveandlight

If you do your own wordpress website does it mean your website has to go live on the internet for the whole world to see while you are putting it together? Or would you be able to hide it from public view until you are ready to launch it?

Reason I ask is because I don't want mine to go live on the internet until its ready. Somebody told me though it has to go live even if you don't want it to go public yet.:o

pitkin2020

loveandlight wrote: »

If you do your own wordpress website does it mean your website has to go live on the internet for the whole world to see while you are putting it together? Or would you be able to hide it from public view until you are ready to launch it?

Reason I ask is because I don't want mine to go live on the internet until its ready. Somebody told me though it has to go live even if you don't want it to go public yet.:o

Wordpress sites are internet based so one page will always be live. You can either not put any links up to the other pages or don't publish them until you are ready. If your building a site just change the index page (the first page your domain points to) to a page saying site under construction or something along those lines.

Not sure why the need for another thread as I answered the question on the other thread you posted on.

pitkin2020

Just to add, join up on the wordpress forum plenty of good advice given on that will be directly related to WP sites.

loveandlight

Thanks. I didn't know wordpress had their own forum so I'll pay them a visit. It seems my new post here crossed with yours on another thread.

steve1980

There are plenty of "coming soon" plugins for wordpress. Just search in the plugin section.

peaceandfreedom

loveandlight wrote: »

If you do your own wordpress website does it mean your website has to go live on the internet for the whole world to see while you are putting it together? Or would you be able to hide it from public view until you are ready to launch it?

Reason I ask is because I don't want mine to go live on the internet until its ready. Somebody told me though it has to go live even if you don't want it to go public yet.:o

You can download and install your own XAMPP server which is an Apache server that runs on your local machine. You can then install and run web applications offline, including Wordpress. It means you can develop a site without any of it being online and play about with it as much as you like. You can install plug-ins and themes etc.in exactly the same way as you would online. When you're ready to go live you can then transfer the site to the live web server.

If you are interested there is info here: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and plenty of online info and tutorials.

peaceandfreedom

peaceandfreedom wrote: »

When you're ready to go live you can then transfer the site to the live web server.

I should add that you need a bit of technical know-how to implement a XAMPP server, though most of the installation is automatic. Also, to move a Wordpress site from one place to another is not 100% straightforward either. However, it's perfectly do-able.

pitkin2020

Good tips peaceandfreedom but I think for the OP it wouldn't be necessary as they could simply not publish the pages whilst building the site. Great for someone is building sites though.

Linbox

peaceandfreedom wrote: »

I should add that you need a bit of technical know-how to implement a XAMPP server, though most of the installation is automatic.

Uniform server is very good and so simple. Also plenty of info on installing most common packages like wordpress .

Very basic wordpress up and running in 10mins, then you'll need to set it up.

Uniform server is also portable so your website can be installed to a USB so you can work on it anywhere.

peaceandfreedom

pitkin2020 wrote: »

Good tips peaceandfreedom but I think for the OP it wouldn't be necessary as they could simply not publish the pages whilst building the site. Great for someone is building sites though.

The thing is that if you don't publish the pages you don't really have a great idea of what the finished site looks like and how it hangs together overall. You can't test it, test links, test cross-browser compatibility etc etc.

It does depend though on how complex the site is. If the OP is just going to use straightforward Wordpress pages (no messing about with HTML/CSS etc) then they should be OK developing it online and not publishing stuff.

Personally, if I were developing online, I would add a suitable robots.txt file in the root directory to ward off search engines and if the theme has a Privacy setting, block search engines that way as well. Then I would just publish as normal with a prominent note on the homepage saying that the site has not yet been launched.

But that's just me, I couldn't cope with developing an entire site of unpublished stuff that I can't view properly.

loveandlight

Ideally I do not want my website to be viewed at all by the public but currently the public can view it even though it is not ready to be viewed. I must admit I'm having lots of sleepless nights over it as there's a lot of content that's just not ready on there and as its only a draft the website looks absolutely awful.
My website designer advises me that it has to be live so that I can edit the content management side of it as well as her doing work on it as well.