For those of you considering building an online portfolio, or a website to showcase you, I have one major piece of advice…kill the splash page. I treat these splash pages like a detour sign in that I don’t even want to waste a click on getting into the website, and I take the detour to find another website that doesn’t subject me to wasting one click to get in.
It is statistically proven that people use three clicks with a website, and if they don’t find what they are looking for in 3 clicks, they move on. Why would you want one of those precious three clicks to be used up on a page that offers no real value to the site?
To back up my point, a web developer Jennifer Kyrnin on About.com, offers the downfalls of using splash pages.
The usability of a splash page is completely flawed. Your readers come to your site to enter it and a splash page prevents that.
Many readers don’t like splash pages – and in some studies 25% of visitors left a site right after seeing a splash page.
Splash pages break search engines. Since many splash pages only include a flash animation there isn’t a lot for a search engine to optimize on. And if you add content to the page in comments you can be penalized for spamdexing.
The animation can be repetitive. Readers who have seen the flash don’t often want to sit through it again, but if you forget to include a “skip” option they will have to.
While the flash movie or fancy animation may look really nice, the impression they make may be one of pretentiousness rather than detailing your skills.
If you submit your splash page to a search engine, the JavaScript codes that move customers to the next page may prevent the search engine from adding any page on the site.
October 14, 2007
