I will be building a (wordpress) web site. While I am developing, other team members will be pushing content. I'd like to have it hidden from google while under development. It will be hosted on godaddy.

I have thought of not pointing the domain name to it until live and using "preview dns",

or buying a static IP during development.

Or hosting dev site in a sub-directory ("/dev/") until ready and then moving it up a level. If in the dev directory I'd add htaccess or robots.txt to not crawl.

Is any of this a bad idea? Will google penalize for any of this - like search by IP and then associate that with the domain later on? Any better ideas?