[thelist] Splash Pages & The Great Unwashed

[noah]

At 02:02 PM 15/08/2001, Martin wrote:
>J. Blanchard wrote on 15/8/01 6:52 pm
>
> >So, I need the good, the bad, and the ugly on this topic as some of the
> >folks I work with want one for the new site, because they want more flash
> >to the site.
>
>Jay
>
>The essential 2 questions are:
>1) What value does the splash page add? (ie what's the benefit that
>exceeds
>     the cost of pissing off your users)
>2) What happens for users who don't have Flash (or dHTML or anything else
>     which is whizzy and not universally supported)?

If the content breaks down easily into sections (i.e., there are 4-6 
separate menu items throughout the site), I've found that a reasonable 
alternative to a pure splash page is a splash page incorporating the menu 
(and maybe a little bit of text). This might not be ideal in terms of 
usability and search engine indexing, but if a client is insisting on a 
splash page, it's a good way to keep it from being entirely useless.

Cheers,
Noah