Doing your own wordpress website

peaceandfreedom

loveandlight wrote: »

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.

Your website designer is right about that. You can ask them though, to do what I suggested above and hide the site from search engines, using Wordpress privacy settings and the robot.txt file. This will mean that even though the site is available online, almost no-one will stumble across it.

centretap

loveandlight wrote: »

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.

As steve1980 says above there are plugins available for Wordpress that display a "Coming Soon" type message to casual visitors. Anyone signed in as an Administrator (your web designer and you) will see the site as it should be and can work on it.

nathand_2

I don't know if anyone has pointed this out already but you don't need to add a coming soon or anything like that. In settings there is a privacy option that stops Google and other search engines from ranking your site so no one will see it without already knowing the link. Secondly you can use a maintenance mode plugin which means you need to be logged in to see the site, other visitors will see a maintenance message.