Splash pages really are dead…

Many years ago, a man called David Siegel (the man who invented the “transparent one pixel gif trick” in web design) wrote a book called ‘Creating Killer Websites‘ and in it, he advocated a site design that looked a bit like this:

The reasoning behind it at the time (if I recall correctly) was that it gave the user the satisfaction of seeing they had got into the site without the big overhead of loading all the graphical and other elements associated with a home page. This was in the days of modems, so it made sense at the time.

Then, as time went on and modems got faster, and then we switched to broadband, and the splash page became either a long flashy intro, or got eliminated in favour of getting people straight to where they wanted to be, as the page with the main navigation made a much better landing page.

But now event the search engines have got in on the act and Google gives you a link direct from the search page to skip the introduction page. An interesting one for them to algorithmically detect, and designed to enhance the user experience/relevance, which is always Google’s goal.

From an SEO point of view, a splash page is always something to be eliminated – it is usually the “strongest” page on a site and to squander it by only linking to one internal page is a dreadful waste of link juice.

So it is good to know that SEOs and usability specialists and Google all agree that the splash page is soooo 1990s.

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