Creating an Under Construction or Coming Soon page in Magento

When building a website, you may not want random visitors snooping your pages until you are ready for them. Even while some programs allow you to build your site on your local computer and then publish when you are finished, you still may want to test your site on the live server before opening to the public. In this case, you may want to place an "Under Construction" or "Coming Soon" page in place.

The problem lies with how your hosting server looks for the first page of your site, also called the index page. The server looks for pages that are named index.htm, index.html, index.php, and default.htm, in that order. If it finds a file with one of those names, it places that as the landing page of your website. Website design programs most often create an index.html or index.php page. When publishing your site, even for testing, it is likely that the first page will begin to display to the public. This article will guide you on how to create and set up a placeholder page so that you can work on your site in the background.

How to create a custom Under Construction/Coming Soon page

1. Log into cPanel.
2. Enter the File Manager. Be sure to navigate to the root folder for the domain you are working with. If it is the primary domain, use public_html.
3. Click on New File, an icon found in the toolbar at the top of the page.
4. Next, give the file a name. Our example will be named comingsoon.html. Click on the Create New File button to complete its creation. Note this simply creates an empty file.
   
5. Now we need to edit the empty file. Highlight the filename and then click on HTML Editor. This allows you to create the page visually, no coding needed. You can make it as fancy or simple as you wish. In our example we will make it very simple.
   
6. Once you have designed your page, click on the Save button in the upper left of the tool bar. It appears as a floppy disk.
7. Now that you have created the page, you need to set the filen ame as your default for your website. Those instructions are found in our article on How to change your default index page in .htaccess. Below is a screenshot of how the page will display on the web once that is completed.
    

Source  : http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/cpanel-file-manager/coming-soon-page

OR

Step 1 - Create an under Construction HTML page

Create an index.html under construction page
Upload this page to your root magento directory
(you have already made that backup, right>?)

Step 2 - Update your .htaccess file

Add the following line to the top of your .htaccess file in the root directory of your magento installation

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Also, upload this file to your root magento directory
(rest assured if anything goes wrong, you’ve got that backup!)
This tells the system to use your index.html file before the index.php, this is essential, otherwise your site will show as usual.

Step 3 - Test your front end and continue working

Your frontend should now show the under construction / maintenance page.
To continue working on your site, simply navigate to your frontend and add /index.php
e.g.
www.yourdomainname.com - goes to the under construction HTML page
www.yourdomainname.com/index.php - goes to your website for development purposes
Once everything is backup and running, simply add a hash (#) to the command line in your htaccess file:
#DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Source : http://www.voodish.co.uk/articles/magento-under-construction-maintenance-page/

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