Is it really as easy as just uploading my landing page files to the root folder? If so, how would I then access the WP stuff to redesign?
If you go this route you’ll have to perform some wizardly to be able to access the WordPress site.
It’s far easier to use WordPress itself to show the “coming soon” landing page.
Logged-in administrators of the website will be able to access the WordPress site and see the active theme being developed “live”, while everyone else will see the “coming soon” landing page created with the plugin.
Easy peasy!
Lots of free plugins available for the job, with varying levels of customizability of the “coming soon” page:
]]>I get you now ??
Here’s one simple idea:
1) Upload the landing page anywhere on the site, naming anything BUT index.html (use maintenance.html. At this time, domain.com will still load your WordPress site.
2) Setup .htaccess rules to redirect all requests to domain.com (obviously except maintenance.html) to this maintenance.html page for everyone. Now all visitors to domain.com will be served your “coming soon” page.
3) Finally, add a bypass in the .htaccess rules for your IP address (and IP addresses of anyone who needs to work on or test the WordPress site) to load the WordPress site.
That’s the logic. You could do a similar thing using PHP code in your functions.php file, instead of .htaccess rules.
Rightnow I’m on the road and can’t send code samples now. So so you’ll have to take it up from there, or hope someone smarter than me turns up to help.
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