You'd be surprised how many people think splash pages are a good idea.

You might also be surprised at how many times it's a really, really bad idea...

A splash page is a page, often written in flash or some such, that comes up before the website and contains no actual site content.

Designers love to use splash pages in their portfolios to impress potential clients with eye-candy. Companies will often make use of them to draw users’ attention to their latest products. The users in question, however, literally can’t stand them, because splash pages usually take a long time to load and provide (almost) no navigation options — except to "Enter the Site."

If you've read our series on How To Make A Hideous Website, you've likely already figured out that we don't like splash pages much. They make it harder to get to a site, they can take a long time to load, and they just generally annoy people. Whenever possible, they are best avoided. But not always.

There are a few occasions where a splash page is a good idea. There are also some circumstances where it may be legally required. The following is a list of 5 times when you might actually want (or need) to use a splash page — even though you shouldn't, for the sake of your visitors' sanity.

1. Splash pages can display disclaimers or warnings which are supposed to restrict access to content such as adult material, alcohol advertising, or gambling (as is required by law in many countries, including Canada and the US).
2. It is necessary to draw visitors’ attention to an important message (emphasis on important) such as an approaching deadline, a critical software update, latest release, news, slogan etc.
3. Visitors are supposed to select the language they want to use or the country they come from — to direct users to the appropriate version of the site.
4. Visitors can choose between a low-bandwidth version (like text-only) and high-bandwidth version (with tons of content eye-candy). This can be handy if you have a lot of visitors using mobile devices.
5. To inform visitors about site requirements such as supported browsers, screen resolution, and if they need Flash, Java, Quicktime etc. and suggests to choose the “right” configuration and download plug-ins for “optimal” site presentation.

How to lose visitors #1

Users don’t like splash pages, however if designed creatively, splash pages can also really get on users’ nerves. Petr Hrubes has an informative and attractive web-site with an absolutely unusable splash page (sorry, Petr). The design of Petr’s splash page offers precise information and is visually appealing, but it has one of the most significant mistakes a splash page can contain — it’s obtrusive and just not user-friendly.

If you are using Firefox or Opera you’ll find out that the mouse click on “Enter” opens the main page in a new tab in your browser. To navigate through the site visitors may want to close the “splash page”-window first and then change to the “main page”-tab. It’s neither necessary nor helpful.

The fans of Safari (Windows) or Internet Explorer (IE has fans???) have even more fun to look forward to. Not only doesn’t the page open in a new tab (although IE7 should be able to pull it off), both browsers also open a new window which is automatically displayed in the fullscreen mode. Without warning. It doesn’t have to be like this.

How to lose visitors #2

Oh, but it can get worse: overly creative designers tend to offer their visitors problems of a different kind. For example, sometimes users have to move the mouse around and around the splash page to recognize what elements can actually be clicked and what should be done to finally get to the content of the page. This site has a good example of a splash page that looks kind of cool... but how long will it take you to figure out how to actually get INTO the site? Try it and see.

Not every visitor is patient, in most cases the page will be closed right away. Or the visitors land on the Adobe-page where they are asked to download the latest version of Flash plug-in. Or they are directed to some design-award web-site where they can observe dozens of beautifully designed web-sites. Wherever they go, you can be sure that they won’t get back.