What to do with visitors while designing site?

I now have around 500 visitors daily, I believe my site has future but I designed it pretty badly and I need to redesign everything from scratch.

The problem is, this will take me around 2 days full time work, how do I redirect my visitors somewhere else (a notice of temporary downtime) while I do the work?

 

Thats nothing to worry about.

You have 2 options...

1. Redesign the site on your local PC and upload it when its all ready. Your visitors will see NO DOWNTIME.
2. If you want to make changes online.. Make an html page with the relevant details that the site is under renovation, and then use htaccess to redirect all users that come to the index page.


Let me know if you need any further help.

 

Make a news feature saying that soon there will be changes to your site.

Make a simple html page with the MAIN links that people will be needing - Forum, Contact, About? (I don't know what you're site is so I'm just giving examples here) With a notice that the site is under going re-development so please be patient and check out the forums whilst we do this. Thank you.

 

change ur original index.html or php to index1 and create a new index with the details

 

You can also use .htacess redirect trick or you can also redirect them into another directory or subdomain of your site.

 

Instead of designing it on his Local PC, he could make a temporary directory on his server (ala www.yoursite.com/test/ ) and work on the new site there, when it's ready upload it over the old site.

 

But what if Google finds the test site first? Wouldn't that cause a duplicate content penalty?
Make it on your PC using XAMMP, then do a quick change.

 

robots.txt in the test directory and tell the robots to piss off.

 

Yeah, but I'd like to see some examples of it working. I've read too much conflicting stuff about robots and filters, I don't know what to make of it.

 

Well, I don't even bother to setup filters, the robots have gone through my test and dev directories, and for the most part they ignore them, but I've never had a search engine murder my links or anything due to a 'duplicate content'... Though I really don't care about the PR of the site that has the test and dev directories.

 

I'd make the site locally and then upload it, you can always put it in a different directory to test it online.