How to take site offline for maintenance?

[ubuntark]

or how to take offline so while I'm building the store and adding the products that only I or other specific people can view it until its actually ready to go live or ( publish ) ?

thanks for your help

[ShopSite Lauren]

There isn't an easy way to take your site offline (and if your site already has ranking with search engines I would not suggest taking it down). Instead, I would suggest setting up a demo store on ShopSite and just adding your databases to the demo. You can send an email to the ShopSite team to extend your demo for a few weeks so that you have time to make all the changes that you want. Then when you are ready, transfer the new images, templates, and upload the databases to your live site.

However, if you would prefer to take your site down, here are a few options.

- login through FTP (not in your ShopSite backoffice) and delete all of your pages. Then go in your ShopSite back office to Utilities > Publish > and uncheck the checkboxes to publish your HTML pages. You can then make changes to your pages, and preview your pages to see what they look like. To preview your shopping cart you can click on an add to cart button from a page preview screen. You can also preview the search feature this way. The only issue with this is that you cannot preview the product more information page.

- if you are just starting to setup your website and don't want it indexed, you can add meta tags for robots to not index and not follow your pages. You can then add a parking space or coming soon page to your index.html page for any customers that do come directly to your website. If a customer had the URL for one of your internal pages, they would be able to view those pages. But, if search engines aren't indexing those pages, this is not likely to happen.