Splash pages suck! by Lloyd Armbrust
Recently, a good friend had some questions about a new web design that we’re going to be doing for her site. She actually had a really good idea–good because it was so original that I don’t think I’ve seen another page like it on the internet. When she was explaining the idea, she thought that the site would look good with a splash page that featured an “enter here” link.
“Splash pages are so awesome,” I said over e-mail, “for websites stuck in 1994.”
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.
Tags: design, splash page, splash pages