Kill All the Splash Pages!
If they ever served a purpose, they serve no purpose today.
That’s the word from online content marketing master, Eric Holter. Eric is just launching a new business aimed at helping ad agencies create an effective Web presence. It’s called agencycritique.com.
Splash pages have always struck me as being pointless wastes of time. Your visitors come to your site to get information about how you can help solve their problems. They do not come to be either amazed or irritated by some wild and wacky graphic that is supposed to represent your creativity.
Of course, I base this assessment on nothing other than my own belief in the commonsensical nature of that proposition. Eric approaches the issue with some actual data.
He notes that for those websites with splash pages 25% of visitors abandon the site right there. He concedes that at his other company, newfangled.com, they spent months building an impressive splash page but abandoned it after they saw the scary abandonment data. He emphasizes that ad agency websites are B 2 B marketing tools not entertainment venues. He stresses:
When a prospective client goes to an agency website, they want information–quickly and easily. They certainly don’t want to sit through an animation before they can start looking. An agency website is a business to business marketing tool. It’s about information–not entertainment. So splash pages just get in the way and annoy.
He then adds an extremely important point, space “It’s a mistake is to think of the site as another opportunity to be creative, rather than a means of showing your creative work.”
Although Eric is targeting an agencies with his new business, agencycritique.com, the same rules apply to almost any business–whether you are selling to other companies or to consumers. Your visitors come to your site to get information. They have many choices of vendor. They are undoubtedly in a hurry. Just as you would not keep them waiting in the lobby, don’t keep them waiting with a splash page.
Be sure to check out the complete article on Eric’s new website which has some great content and also an elegant WordPress design.
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Thanks Newt! How magazine’s latest issue (October 2008) includes an article called “Rock Your Website,” by Lisa Hazin. She quotes me on my points of view about agency websites. She also added a sidebar from my list of common agency website mistakes. If you’re at a Barnes and Noble or Borders, check it out!
I have next to no patience. If there’s a flash intro, I bail out.