quarantinehawaii.com

Unlike building a house, development of a website takes place on a copy of the site instead of the real site. This means that while the site is being built, it is not available for the public to view and use on the Internet. With a bit of thought, this should make sense. Any potential client who came across the site-in-progress would probably get frustrated with bits and pieces that don’t work, error messages, untidy presentation, and any number of things that could scare away valuable customers
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Chapter 1
at the drop of a hat. A far more important and dangerous threat to an unfinished site that has been made live is that hackers could potentially access important information, and/or gain control over the site. An unprotected site like this is effectively a free meal for the denizens of the Web—don’t think it won’t happen to you!
So, all development happens on a development machine and not on the hosted site. Some readers may well be wondering what to do with their domain in the meantime, assuming one has already been purchased. The best solution is to put up what is known as a placeholder page that delivers a simple message that this is the right site, that development is in progress on the working site, and that customers should visit again in the near future. If you want to learn how to get a page onto your Internet site before going any further, then check out Chapter 11 on deployment, which outlines the process of moving your fully functional website onto your Web domain. The process for doing the whole site and a single page is more or less the same but naturally, moving a single page is a lot less complicated.