unlaunch

[cynthiann99]

I want to hide my site while I'm revamping it... can you suggest the best way to do this?

[Robert_K__Bell]

Anything drastic such as 301 Moved Permanently or 404 Not Found will hurt your PageRank; using a javascript redirect like window.location = '/'; will probably hurt too.

BC's lack of a staging area, or even the 302 Moved Temporarily response makes in-place redesigns like this more difficult than they should be.

One method that leaves the live site untouched while you work on the redesign is to create a Trial Site using the Live Site as a base; once the redesign is completed, you'd then copy all pages / module data back to the live site. Note that references to module IDs may be different between the live and staging sites.