Private Website

I know of two solutions for this. Someone else might come along with better ideas, too…but…

1) Use your .htaccess file to password-protect your wordpress directory. Then only people you pass the username and password to can visit the site. Everyone else will get a “Forbidden” error page. This is not a WordPress thing – you have to edit/create your own .htaccess files to do this.

2) Install WordPress in a subdirectory, but place index.php outside of the installation, one level up. Make it a static page. Leave only the “login” link of your Meta section on the static page. People who come to your site will see the static page, and can’t go any further into the site unless they log in. This can be done solely with WordPress code, but it’s most certainly advanced theme editing to get it done.

Like I said, there may be other options, but those are the two I know of.

Re #1, doodlebee: this is easily handled if the person has a cPanel-enabled host; cPanel provides a very user-friendly interface for doing this without ever having to deal with .htaccess.

True – good point vkaryl (I have cPanel, and I’ve used it before) – I forgot about that ??

Yah, me too – I wouldn’t have remembered it to post about if my daughter hadn’t called and asked me if I thought it would work!

i use godaddy. do they have cpanel?

GoDaddy has *a* control panel, but not cPanel. I dont’ know if they have the capability – but if they do, you need to look for something that allows you to password-protect directories.

If they don’t have it, then .htacess is just as easy – it’s not hard to do at all. Google for “using .htaccess to password protect directories” and you’ll see a plethora of tutorials. It’s two very small files – really easy.