Should I set my pages to "noindex, follow"?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Scott Cohen: Hi all.
  I'm worried I might have really screwed up. I am designing a site for a client on a brand new URL. It is a wordpress site. Since it is a brand new URL that nobody has been given a link to I have been developing it right on the server, no coming soon page, etc...since nobody can know where to find it anyway. I realized I also have not set my pages to  ;"noindex, follow"My questions are should I set my pages to "noindex,follow" at this stage in the game? (design is  ;set, content is not), and did I do irreparable damage to the future SEO of this site?
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  Ben Bignell: I would block all search engines with robots txt until your ready to index it, you wouldn't have done any damage 
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  Ian Dixon: A safish way to keep the search engines away while in development +Scott Cohen ; is to simply use the Wordpress setting that I at least have. Now that only encourages them to stay away but they might still look and index.
  
  +Ben Bignell ;robots.txt acts to discorage robots from crawling  ;a site but that is far from saying that they dont. Even Google from what I recall reading will bypass robots,txt
  
  The safest way is to build a new site on an offline machine,. Next safest is to password protect the whole site because the bots are unable to get past passwords.
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  Scott Cohen: Since creating a dev site isn't an option at this point I'll take these suggestions. Great responsive community here. Thanks for all the help! 
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  Ben Bignell: +Ian Dixon ;fair point but i blocked my old site with robots txt and its no where to be found now. Anyway good luck +Scott Cohen ;
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  Frank Rodríguez: +Scott Cohen do everything in pre production on a local server when ready then upload to server live. Its standard practice . Get it off live & go to an off server.
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  Jeff Guest: I generally build mine on sub domain of a domain that has robot.txt no follow so I don't have to remember to block search engines. I hear what you say about offline development but I work from several locations and need to access sites from where ever i am, plus clients can check build at every stage.