# Where Do I go from here? hiding a site before it goes live



## lizacwilson (Mar 9, 2007)

Just wondering if anybody could give me a few tips about what I do next with my website. I am building my site in Dreamweaver 8, and I am pleased with how it is coming along. I have never done this before, and my previous experience has really been in graphic design, and not much web building! I wanted to create something different, so created it from scratch, and its just how I wanted it to look. 

I have my domain name, and hosting set up, and plan to use paypals free shopping cart. So everything is ready for me to launch.

What I dont understand is, When I upload my site to my hosting company, does this automatically mean people can access my website? The reason being, that it is still not finished yet, and I plan to add all of the buttons for paypal checkout when everything else is done. I really want to check that everything looks ok though. I see some sites have signs that say they are in the middle of being updated etc. 

How would I do this? And Could I do that to the whole site?
Also, is it possible to hide the whole website while you are still working on it?

Sorry thats a lot of questions! I am still learning


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

*Re: Where Do I go from here?*

When the site is uploaded to the server it is live and visible. If you don't want it visible you can put it in a passworded directory, or you can put it on a sub-domain or in a sub-folder and not tell anyone it's there. If people go there they'll be able to see it, but they'd need to know where it was.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

*Re: Where Do I go from here?*



> Also, is it possible to hide the whole website while you are still working on it?


Remember, if you don't tell anybody about your website, they won't know it's there 

The only way for people to get there is if they guessed your website address.

It's not likely they will find it in search engines.

You could also create an index.html page that is a "coming soon" page and then make your temporary website homepage title home.html and then when people visit your site, they will automatically see the index.html page and nobody will know about home.html and the rest of your pages until you make it live (by deleting index.html and renaming home.html to index.html)


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## lizacwilson (Mar 9, 2007)

Thanks guys!!

I will pluck up the courage to do it soon, but I think I may just give myself a little more time before uploading my site. 

I hadn't really thought about the chances of someone stumbling upon my site if I hadn't told many people about it, so I guess they probably wouldn't just find it! That does make me feel better!  

I am sure there's going to be a ton of errors in there that I'll have to try and sort out, so, I'll just put it off a little longer.. He Hee.. I'm sure folks here will take a look at it when its ready, and give me some feedback... 

Liza


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## Parlophone (Feb 8, 2007)

good suggestions from the vets. don't be afraid of going live either, there aren't that many people looking anyways. send out your link to family, friends and _especially_ strangers like us. like life, you often receive the most valuable advise from people who don't care if the truth hurts.

study/obsess over your visitor tracking statistics (how did people arrive, how long did they stay, what pages did they view, what region of the world do they live, what pages did they exit from, what is their browser resolution, etc.). if your hosting company does not provide such stalky info, then check out statcounter.com -- slip a piece of code into your html and track your visitors. studying this data will be crucial when you begin marketing and selling your brand.


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## lizacwilson (Mar 9, 2007)

Parlophone said:


> good suggestions from the vets. don't be afraid of going live either, there aren't that many people looking anyways. send out your link to family, friends and _especially_ strangers like us. like life, you often receive the most valuable advise from people who don't care if the truth hurts.
> 
> study/obsess over your visitor tracking statistics (how did people arrive, how long did they stay, what pages did they view, what region of the world do they live, what pages did they exit from, what is their browser resolution, etc.). if your hosting company does not provide such stalky info, then check out statcounter.com -- slip a piece of code into your html and track your visitors. studying this data will be crucial when you begin marketing and selling your brand.


Thanks for all the great advice. I guess deep down, I don't know what sort of response i'm going to get, even though I think everything looks great, maybe other people won't! (some of my friends and family have seen some of my work, and they seem to like it)

I'm using 123.reg to host my site, and they do have a chart which shows me hits and other stuff. I have a little set back at the moment with my computer.. Its finally had to go in to get re-formmatted as I had so many errors popping up all over the place. I've backed everything up, so i'm keeping my fingers crossed I can continue a.s.a.p! I guess I'm just gonna have to wait a little longer!

Liza


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## TripleT (Apr 29, 2007)

Best of Luck with your new siste Liza - Great advise from Parlophone


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## fredschellart (May 9, 2007)

You can use a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file is a short text file that lives in your home directory. Before search engines spider your site, they look into this file to see which files/file types and/or directories they are not allowed to see. Mention these files.

To exclude all robots from the entire server make a file with this content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Name it robot.txt and upload it to the root of your site.


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

fredschellart said:


> You can use a robots.txt file.


I know very little about SEO, but I've always been reluctant to do that in case the search engines take an overly long time to come back and see if anything has changed.


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