Planning a full rebrand and relaunch, need help with logistics!
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Okay, I’ve been working towards doing a complete re-vamp of all my categories, menus, pages, and organization, as well as putting in a new theme. I have a lot of it prepared offline, but I’m very sure it’s going to take me a day or two to get the site fully working and ready for visitors again. (Many of the pages I have to publish will have to be completely rewritten with a specialized template that I don’t have access to until I change the theme… so I can’t really get them finished ahead of changing the theme.) I don’t want to change the blog to private, take the blog down, or mess with the search engines finding my blog, but I also don’t want any visitors that show up while I’m working on this weekend – getting it all uploaded, published, configured, and ready for use – to end up getting weird messages or trying to wander around the old site, getting lost.
I thought, maybe, I could make a temporary header menu that doesn’t link to anything except back to a static “temporarily under construction” page, and then work on the pages and posts in the background.. but I don’t know if that would work. Does any one know a better way to do this? Or is my idea valid? … Or should I just take whatever time it takes and ignore the fact that visitors while I’m working will just get confused and lost?? <– Something I REALLY don’t want to do! … HELP!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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We don’t have anything specifically like that besides just making the site private.
If you’re just working on new pages in the background though, one thing you can do is customize your menu: https://wordpress.com/support/menus/
When you do that and have it built as you like, make sure you uncheck “Automatically add new top-level pages to this menu” https://wordpress.com/support/menus/add-links-to-a-menu/#automatically-add-pages-to-your-menu and all your new pages as you build them will be left out.
When you’re ready to launch those pages, just re-build the menu with the new pages.
As an extra layer of privacy, you make those new pages private: https://wordpress.com/support/post-and-page-visibility/ just don’t forget to make them public when you launch.
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@illusorythral,
I thought, maybe, I could make a temporary header menu that doesn’t link to anything except back to a static “temporarily under construction” page, and then work on the pages and posts in the background..
Hi. This can be easily done by creating a new menu that includes only a link to your ‘under construction’ page, but the problem with this solution is that if the site is still public, then all posts and pages may still be reached from external links. My ideas below have the same defect, which might be why staff-blorbo didn’t suggest something similar.
Idea #1:
1. Create a page that explains that renovation is underway and access to the pages and posts is presently unavailable. The page might be titled “Site Under Renovation.”
2. Assign that page as your homepage.
3. Hide from the homepage any widgets that include links to posts or pages.
4. Create a new menu, to be assigned as your navigation menu temporarily, that has either a link only to the homepage, or no menu items.Idea #2:
Alternatively, if some posts don’t need renovation, then you may display only those selected posts on the temporary homepage I’ve suggested above, by using the “Choose Specific Posts” option, as described in the Display Settings section of the Blog Posts Block support page. You could also hide widgets on these posts. -
Other ideas:
You could create a widget with a message about the renovation, or a link to the ‘under construction’ page, and display only that widget on all posts and pages, moving the other widgets temporarily to the inactive widgets area. This would make access to the rest of the site more difficult for those who reach a page or post from an external link.
Temporarily disable related posts, as described in the Enable Related Posts section of the Related Posts support page. So if someone reaches an individual post via an external link, and certain widgets are hidden on the post, they won’t find links to other posts there.
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It would be nice if WordPress would implement the ability to have a staging/experimental area so you can easily work privately until you’re ready to launch. It would copy the whole site to the new area, while it continues serving the current site.
It should have buttons to Launch and Discard the staged changes. In addition to a global buttons, these should also be on each page to apply to just that page. Discard would copy the current page back over the modified one in the staging area to undo changes.
To view the staged site, it could have a special URL like whatever-staging.wordpress.com while serving the current unchanged website at whatever.wordpress.com.
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Thanks for the suggestion. It’s something several people have requested over the years, and I’ll add your vote for this to our internal feature request board. But at this time we don’t have any plans to support staging environments on WordPress.com.
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