I went on to explain that a splash page is possibly the worst thing you could do for new website (aside from using frontpage to create it). Right away you’re telling your users that not only do you hate them, but you actually revel in wasting their time.

Sure, at first a splash page seems like a good idea. “It’s neat”,”sooo cute”,”and what a cewl design idea!”–until that user has to actually use that site.

Think about Google: would it make sense for them to have a page that says “Welcome to google, click to enter” even if it looked really swell? If that were the case, I would have clicked on that stupid enter link over 200,000 times in my life already! The web is now all about convenience, or, delivering exactly what your user needs as fast as possible. With Google today you can even add local weather, news, and blog updates to that same simple homepage. Adding a splash page in front of that would just waste everyone’s time.

The web is all about repeat visitors now. Can you imagine how quickly the “that’s kind of neat” will fade once a customer or advertiser goes to your site a second, third, and forth time? It will simply become annoying. Just like you wouldn’t want to put a hard-to-read font on a resume–even if it looked really artsy–you do not want to give your end user any fixable reason to discard you . . . because you are not special: there are 10,000 different places that your users could be going.

I know it doesn’t seem like much, but it really really is. It’s all about the motive behind your design: you want to do everything possible to give your users the best, and fastest, experience.

Just like Lord of the Rings, or the digitally-remastered version of Star Wars, if anything has a lot of hype attached to it, I will instantly–and irrationally–write it off.

So, I guess i’m coming around.  But I still hate the word.