How to prevent public view of unfinished site?

[TravelswCharlie]

How do others handle it when you are building a site and it's not ready for public view?

I know I can build and keep it on my own computer, but quite a few things don't look the same when I actually publish my site to Bluehost, so I decided to go ahead and do that.

But, I don't want the search engines to see it half finished.

At first, I thought it was safe because, from all I've heard, it would be a long time before any search engine would find it.

But within days, my unfinished site was showing up in the major seach engines.

Does anyone know how that happened? Does Bluehost automatically submit to search engines?

I read the section about password protect of certain directories, allowing access to certain users, but "index" was not there, and it did not seem to apply to the whole site.

That's what I'd like to do... prevent public view of my site, but be able to give a password to someone who needs to view it to check something for me.

Can anyone to me how to do this?

Thanks.

CJ

[Early Out]

Two steps that should keep a search engine from finding your site before you're ready:

First, just rename your index.html to something like newindex.html, until you're ready to "go live." You may have to fiddle with some "go back" links to make it all work, of course.

Second, prevent anyone from being able to find that newindex.html unless you tell them about it by turning off indexing of the directory. In the Control Panel, hit the Index Manager.

The other alternative is to password-protect the directory. Remember, "index" isn't a directory (unless you've created a directory with that name). You need to password-protect the directory that contains index.html.

[grant]

What Early Out said.

Also, you can put whatever future layouts you might have into a temporary folder, and only you would know what folder to look in. Just name it something obscure.

[TravelswCharlie]

Thanks to both of you!

I guess I would have figured that out on my own eventually, but you sure saved me a bunch of time!

Thanks again,

CJ