A Splash page is the landing, or home page, to a website that serves as an introductory or entry page. It tends to be a page containing graphics for aesthetic purposes,  with a link to enter the site proper.

From an SEO perspective, a splash page is wasted effort as it’s the page for your domain’s URL, but generally contains no text, therefore little or nothing  for search engines to index. Also, as they often have flash or graphic content, the page may take longer to load. Load speed is now a ranking factor with Google, so this is relevant to any design decisions made.

From a users perspective, the aesthetic value added tends to be more than outweighed by the negative experience of taking longer to get to the content the user is interested in.

But for those who insist on retaining a splash page, a user friendly way of achieving the same effect might be to cookie the page so that a visitor is shown it only on the first visit.

Alternatively, a lightbox effect could be used for a similar graphic effect, but could be accompanied by a fully optimised home page.

An example of a splash page is www.dunneandcrescenzi.com.

I do like the restaurants, but it takes soooh  long to find the menu and the phone no. to book, that I’m tempted to give in to a Big Mac!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Web Word – ‘anchor text’
2. Weekly Web Word – Deep Web
3. Weekly Web Word – ‘deep links’
4. Weekly Web Word – Chicklet