How to hide the front end of Joomla from viewers while making changes?

Question

I have a website at the moment with a redirect which points www.example.com to subscribe.example.com which shows a LaunchRock subscription splash screen. The reason I did this was because the website isn't finished yet, and I figured I would put some filler up in the meantime so I could show my friends what I'm doing and planning.

My question is, how do I work on the website without anyone seeing the front end. For instance if you're familiar with the website reddit.com, when reddit goes down they have a splash page that comes up and says "reddit is down" and no one can see what is going on behind that while they change things. How do I do that whilst still being able to see the website myself and view the changes I'm making?

Answer 1

You need to put it in Offline mode

1. Go to your Joomla Backend
2. Go to "Site" on the top menu, then go to "Global Configuration".
3. Select "Site Offline" to yes.

Hope this helps