To send or Not to send (your traffic to splash pages)

[Power]

My question:

Is it best to send your traffic first to a splash page or should you send them straight to your home page website. (In this case straight to my personal development home page website)

Anybody has experience good or bad, any opinions?

I'm testing it at the moment but it will save time and effort to hear and be enlightened from someone who experimented with it.

Thx in advance

[Niki]

I think it depends upon the structure and content of your site. Let's say your site is available in three languages, it would be useful to have a 1 time splash screen, to pick a language so the user's language can be saved in a cookie or something. Otherwise I would not use a splash screen, because it makes the way to your site 1 click longer.

[hkalchemy]

Effortless Wealth and Abundance
Personally I dislike Splash pages and usually close them immediately. But I imagine they can be successful. Just not sure why ...

[Vanessa]

One of the positives about having traffic sent to a landing page over you're home pages is that you have the ability to control exactly the content on the landing page based on the focus you give your ads or the search term used to bring your visitors to your sight. When you bring them to your homepage they have to digg through what you have to look for what they were really interested in. When you have a landing page, you give them exactly the content they were looking for to bring them into your site.

Plus you can test different landing pages to see which of your topics go where. From what I've read on Steve's forums most of his organic search traffic never lands on his home page but on specific articles about a topic someone was curious about.

[Tayrak]

When you say splash page I think of those ugly, loud things that are supposed to make us buy immediately. Unless it's something I'm real interested in I shut the ugly things without reading.

That is not to say you can't make a nice looking splash page, that would be a nice change. First off kill the red headers. I think we should start a campaign to have them abolished from the net. Of course then we couldn't see a scam coming at us quite so easily...

They do say they work and the bloody things are everywhere. Run some tests, find out what works better.

Tayrak

[Yennifer]

Splash page can appear but only once. As it was said, if it serves to choose the language - it is necessary.

But other unnecessary splashes just irritate your visitors. And it is surely not what you want

[JimOfferman]

Web usability research from guys like Jacob Nielsen has shown time and again that first time visitors decide whether to stay on your site or look elsewhere in the first 20 seconds or so.

Given that incredibly short time span, can you really risk wasting your visitor's precious time with a splash page?

The correct answer to the above question is obviously a loud and resounding 'No!'

[ragtag]

Don't do splash pages! They are just annoying and you will simply loose readers.

For choosing a language, you can use the ip address of the one accessing the page to figure out in which country they are, and then show the appropriate language. Google even does this. Most users will then get the language they want, and the few who just happen to be abroad or don't speak the language in the country they're accessing your page from, you can have small flags on your page where they can switch.

Also, don't make your whole page in flash and make sure people can link directly to and bookmark stuff on your page.

[yossarian]

I really like your content, I'll be coming back to you site Thanks

[Power]

Originally Posted by yossarian

I really like your content, I'll be coming back to you site Thanks

I'm glad you enjoy it, thanks I just started it this year and I'm still slowly developing it adding more each time.


Thank you guys for your responses. It's been close to 2 months of testing and I did see the difference, big difference. My main goal with splash pages was to filter the audience.. I guess, I can still filter them on my home page rather than a splash page.