On 4/27/05, Rex Baldazo <Rex.Baldazo at cnet.com> wrote: > Depends a lot of course on the site, but one reason some sites do that > is they really don't get a lot of traffic via the front door so they use > that as a brand identity page. I've usually heard it called a "splash" > page, kinda like how some apps display a splash window when they start > up (Adobe Acrobat, for one). > > If the site gets most of its traffic thru Google then what happens is > visitors will click from Google directly into a content page on that > site. The theory is that this user, who perhaps has never heard of your > site, might then click the Home link on the page to learn more about > your site. Thus it makes sense to display brand-identity info on the > Home page instead of actual content.
It was a fad in the late 90s that hasn't completely gone away :) I suspect it came from people on the board who were used to applications having splash-screens and wanted the site to have the same because they felt it was important. We all had a splash-page in '98 etc. Fortunately it didn't take too long to realise that it was pointless and so now the only people who have them are sites that haven't changed in 5 years (few of those thankfully) and people who want to do something snazzy in Flash. Hen | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be April 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
