[Matrix]

You also have to look at the advantages of a splash screen for design and administration. You can do alot of work behind the scenes on the client or server side, and all the client thinks is he or she are seeing a welcome screen.

You could be logging, sniffing browsers, detecting flash, detecting cookies, setting cookies, etc. These are all things you could do on your main page, however, it would be more efficient to do them on a light page first.

Also, if you do intro's and all of that, you could save on your bandwidth by creating a page that allows for the user to enter site or view intro. That way, only unqiue users will most likely be viewing intro, saving you tons of GB's a month.

One last thing, you should always bury your home page somewhere under the classic index.php page. This way you can easily redirect should you need to update your site, shut it down, etc. Using simple $_GET vars PHP can easily do this.

Just my thoughts.