Website Features Poll #1

Well what ya think?

[Scott]

For what?

websites in general, i mean the pages that have an image with enter here

[Steve]

hehe i click 'OK' because i use one http://stevieb.dfhq.net

but in general i don't like em. i used one as a kind of news page, with the latest map i made being there. and i made sure everyone can see the 'enter' otherwise ppl might not realise and leave.

<table width="650" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="500">
<tr>
<td width="650" height="500" valign="top"> <iframe src="http://stevieb.dfhq.net/index.html" name="sbnews" id="sbnews" width="650" height="500" marginwidth="2" frameborder="0" scrolling="yes" >
You can't see the cool menu I made because you are using Netscape
:s You're not missing much though, it is just for updates. <a href="http://stevieb.dfhq.net/index.html" target="_blank">Click
here to see the news page.</a></iframe></td>
</tr>
</table>


i don't approve of them ona big resource site however, personally i want to and i feel that all visitors just want what they want in the shortest time possible. type the web addy, click download whatever leave. i see the enter page as a hazard and sometimes a way of getting u to vote for something.

intros on network sites is good if it is used as a portal to diff game pages otherwise the page is crammed with useless info about a game u dont even want to know about

i like intros but only on squad sites, or fun sites.

[BlackMass2]

i agree about using a splash page on a large resource site such as this one (or others, such as nova-arena, df barracks, etc.). they don't generally mix well (my opinion only).

on personal portfolio's and smaller fan sites and resource sites, splash pages can work if done right, and often times the splash itself is something to showcase.

check out shadowness for an example of a splash that works wonders.

[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.

[Matt]

Ya, I really like how Shadowness does that. Very cool stuff.

[Sal UK]

Originally posted by BlackBelt
websites in general, i mean the pages that have an image with enter here

I had to do it lol as i havent found a way yet to go straight to my home page after the intro has played.Its us inexperieced site makers.But if i find out how to do it on the last frame on the intro ill have it going straight inn

[zza1pqx]

The admin usage for splash pages sounds great but its not actually good practise if you want to run a very effective site.

Why?
All the top search engines rank your pages based on many things but the index.html is the daddy in this case.
If google sees only a link to'main.html' or worse, if it sees only a flash script, then you can be assured of a very low ranking even if you are competent in the use of meta-tags.

[Matrix]

If you use pertinent meta tags it doesn't matter whether the splash or the hoemepage is your front page. Alot of the search engines now a days are doing great work to ensure not many stale copies of pages are kept, hence they are spidering more often.

Splashes are a designers call, I really don't think it has much of a search engine bearing.

[Steve]

google seems to like page titles.

[zza1pqx]

From Google
Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google ... examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

It makes a difference.
Perhaps not for Pepsi or Microsoft but for Dave and Samantha it does.