temporarily hide my unfinished site?

[KennyKParticipant]

Hey folks, hello to the group! I am KennyK, vector cartoon illustrator and new member – and anxious to get my Symbiostock site fully functional. As soon as I found out about Symbiostock I thought it was a great idea and decided to join. I’ve had my initial setup done so it’s published and visible online (kennykstock.com), however because my schedule’s been out of control lately, I haven’t had a chance to read up on all the online Symbiostock resources and get in there myself to upload all my content, make text and design tweaks, etc. So it’s visibly and embarrassingly unfinished at the moment, but still available for everyone to see.

So my questions for now are:

1) How do I un-publish or hide my site, while I get my act together over here behind the scenes? I poked around in WP and don’t see how I can do this. Though I’m familiar the basics of some web software packages from maintaining my own sites with over the years, WP is new to me.

2) I’ve been getting a few “new user registration” notices in the last couple of days. What does this enable a registrant to do at this point? I’m not ready to start selling files yet; my license agreement and pricing haven’t been defined, and my hi-res and vector content isn’t uploaded yet, although it appears that the purchasing process is functional. I don’t want someone to make a purchase at this point and get nothing. The big point here is that I don’t want to turn off potential new purchasers; I figure I have one shot at making a good impression on someone who finds me online, and if I appear unprofessional and disorganized, they’re never coming back to me.

So what are my options here, and how do I go about doing this? Thanks folks, any help for a newbie would be greatly appreciated! I hope to be up and running within a month.

-KennyK

[stevehParticipant]

Hi Kenny

I think the only people finding your site are the ones making spam registrations! Most people have the Anti-Captcha plug in installed – this invisibly stops the sort of spam registration you are seeing.

I would delete all the users you have so far – they are almost certainly useless.

As for hiding it – I think you could rename the index file in the main WP directory for a while, but I would just leave it running – Google will slowly index it and people will then very slowly find it.

Steve

My stock site
Symzio agency

[ChristineParticipant]

Hi Kenny

Welcome to Symbiostock and the forum

To hide your site from the network (but not from the web as you might have to make every page private which would be a chore)

Go to Symbiostock (with the bee symbol), Symbiostock, Network – near the bottom of the page there is an option to Activate or Deactivate – deactivate this and save.

New users – if they are spam I highly recommend the the Anti-Captcha plugin, this allows real users to register but stops the bots.

You can also deactivate ALL your sale pages by going to Symbiostock, Symbiostock, Author Options and near the top of the page under Image Status – there is a Live/Not Live option. Maybe set yourself a date and add a note to the front page about your grand opening?

http://kerioakimaging.com - trying to reopen
http://nail-art-at.kerioak.com - Art and Nail Art

[ajtParticipant]

Welcome!

I haven’t tested this plugin, but it seems to do exactly what you need 🙂

http://wordpress.org/plugins/underconstruction/

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

This is the anti-captcha plugin a number of us are using

http://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-captcha/

I would strongly suggest that you put some text on the home page saying that you’re in the process of setting up the site and leave it active. As long as you disable spam registrations and comments (which you need to do anyway so you don’t get bombarded once the site is really “open”) you shouldn’t have any problems staying open while you build the site.

[KennyKParticipant]

jsnover – yes, I just installed the Anti-Captcha plugin.

ajt – great tip about the Under Construction plugin, although I’ve installed it and activated it, and it’s still not working. I believe I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do to activate it, I don’t know why I’m not getting any results, even after logging out. I’ll contact their tech support.

Christine – great, I’ve made all the sale pages Not Live.

steveh – will do about deleting the spam registrations.

Thanks very much for the quick reply and great info, all!

[KennyKParticipant]

Hey ajt, the Under Construction plugin is working now, I don’t know what the problem was – maybe it takes awhile to propagate? Great suggestion, thank you!

Hope to be live soon and officially be a part of the Symbiostock community!

[Author]

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