Splash Page Usage

The web is fundamentally different from just about every other marketing medium. It is a passive source of information. People go to it, rather than it going to them. Television commercials, ads in magazines, billboards on the highway, posters in an airport, they all get "pushed" in front of me. When I watch TV, commercials are forced upon me (although not anymore, I have TiVo!). When I read a magazine I must flip past ads. Each of these marketing attempts has a great deal of work to do to get my attention. When I am actively watching a show, or reading an article, ads have to wrestle my attention away from my primary activity. We, as creative professionals, have had to learn how to use creativity and visual impact to wrestle attention away from a person's primary activity and get them to pay attention to our client's message.

The web is different. Websites don't show up on the side of the road as I drive by. They don't interrupt the Patriots game. The only time I see a website is if I type in the address or click on a link to deliberately go there (annoying pop-up ads excluded). Therefore, when I arrive at website it has to do nothing to grip my attention other than to deliver the information I am expecting to find (of course in a way that is professional, well designed, and easy to access). They do not have to announce themselves or draw my attention from something else. I am going to it; I am pulling the information to me.

This distinction is critical to why splash pages are a bad idea. This distinction is also critical for us to understand why we, as designers, tend to make this mistake and so frequently use splash pages. It goes against the pattern of everything else we are used to doing when it comes to creativity, design, and marketing.

If you buy the fact that a website has a very different kind of "work" to do than a television spot, or billboard then you can see why splash pages are so disliked by most site visitors. It's because we're overpowering a visitor, shouting at them to "wake up" and pay attention to our message when we already have their complete attention.

Imagine if you were going to come and visit me at my home. You would need to take a trip to get there, and hopefully, if the directions were good and the street signs were marked and easy to read, you would find my house. I would probably tell you to look for the tan house with the blue fence and when you pulled up to the house you would see that it matched the description I'd given you. You would also be able to see the number of the house right next to the front door to make sure you have the right address. You would be able to see that the mailbox is labeled "Holter." All this would tell you that you've found the right house and so you would walk up to the door and ring the bell.

How would you feel if, at that moment, a marching band started streaming out of the front door placing the "Welcome to the Holter's March" and a big banner dropped down over the doorway that read, "You've Arrived at the Holter's." Then, what if you had to wait as a few people came out and each one told you a short bit about our house or about our family? Finally, when all the fanfare was over, you were instructed to ring the bell again and we would then come to the door. Unless this was some kind of surprise party, I don't think such a welcome would be very well received. In fact, it might send you running.

The fact of the matter is that we don't have to work very hard at getting attention when it comes to designing the home page of our websites. If they arrive on our site we already have their attention. However, there is a great deal of work that does needs to be done on a home page, but it's not attention getting work.

The kind of work that does have to be done is clarifying, organizing, positioning, and message defining. This is very hard work. This work extends well beyond the home page and impacts the entire site. The ironic thing is that we tend to spend a lot of time building splash pages that work hard, when they don't have to work hard, and the work they are doing often hurts rather then help. Then on top of that, the time we spend on a splash page takes away from the time we might otherwise spend crafting our positioning, content, and message for the homepage and the overall structure and organization of the site. We would be far better off, and have more site visitors, if we spent more time on the substance of the site and did away with the splash page altogether.   next >