Are you the teacher responsible for your school’s website? Perhaps you have a classroom blog.
Either way, there will be times that you’re trying out new things on your site that you don’t want the rest of the world to see. Here are some scenarios:
- You’re flipping through a few new themes and layouts and you don’t want visitors to see the “rough” drafts.
- You’re creating a school website, but it can’t go “live” until you have your principal’s approval.
- Things have gone wrong and you need to temporarily “close” the site until the problem is fixed.
We’re working on our school website (using a self-hosted WordPress blog to create the site) and we need a blank splash page so that visitors can’t see the real site until it’s ready.
Maintenance Mode is a neat little WordPress plugin that does the trick.
- It allows you to throw up a customizable splash page so that when people try to visit your website, they see a little message saying the site is under construction. (If you know HTML, you can change the message to say anything you want.)
- If you are logged into your account (there’s a little administration link in the bottom right corner) and try to visit your site, you’ll see the actual site. (If you’re not logged in, you see the splash page.)
Once your plugin is installed (which can be done easily if you’re using plugin-central), you can turn the maintenance mode page on or off with the click of a button.
Bottom Line: So, if you are creating your school site as a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can use this plugin to hide your site until you’re ready to officially launch it.