Hey,

Back again. My site is getting closer to finish, and now that im starting an SEO training course that i grabbed online to do some seo work on my own, some questions arise.

my partner for the site proposed early on that a splash page is the way to go. (myweddingisover.com) Beside some need for crisper text, it looks alright.

But like ive been saying for past 6 months, i think the loading, first of all, along with no real content being on it will hurt our traffic and seo. while not flash and still able to use meta tags n such, is my partners argument for "branding" enough to keep it?

lemme know please, im trying to talk him out of it, esp once the site goes live.

Bryan

Just a word of warning, as advised from Gabehabe: Splash pages are old and is not that popular nowadays. But, its really up to you.

Hmm, a few points.

From an SEO perspective, there's not much content on there. Granted, spiders will crawl the whole site through all your links, but it's a good idea to get some good content on that front page - it's the most important, IMO. (I could be wrong)

Also, a more personal note I suppose, but I hate them. And you'll find that a lot of people hate them. They're kinda "out of fashion" now.

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of your splash screen. It would be better as a logo or something, rather than stretching it to fit a window as a splash screen.

This is mostly a matter of opinion, but most people I meet share
1) splash screens look unprofessional
2) users like to get to the content straight away

And this one... this one is really important.

I downloaded your splash image. It's 1.1mb. Think about how users might be on low speed connections, they could be faced with a blank screen for a minute or so while it loads. Would you have the patience to wait a minute for an image before accessing content on a page?

Of course, if you were really desperate to have a splash screen, you could cloak it. Forward the IP addresses of web spiders to the main page with content instead of presenting them with a splash screen.

This post has been edited by gabehabe: 5 Jun, 2009 - 02:25 AM

thanks guys

this is EXACTLY what i have been telling him, but for some reason he has this damn branding idea in his head. At first i had the logo in the middle with the white bg, something like 70kb, which was fine. but this takes way too long to load.

guess just got put the pressure on him, hopefully he will come around

thanks again

I agree with gabehabe, i just watched the image load. Having that delay makes it look less professional.

Everything would be fine, just if it didnt have the image. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://w.../&id=983100