A lot of us have bludomain sites and so have splash pages. We also have blogs. Blogs reach 3x more people than my mainsite. A lot pros have moved to blogsites that incorporate everything. Eventually I will also move in that direction.

I suspect that’s why Travis is going for a blog setup for The Perfect Pose….

Yea, thats right! Also I have removed the splash page from one of my sites, and have kept the other up as a “control”. I want to analyze what the bounce rate reduction is 7 days from when I originally removed the splash page. Which will be Saturday, so check my blog for the results.

Travis

Let us know how it goes. Do a video. Or send me an email….

will do brother!

I went from a 75% bounce rate with a bad spash page to a 56% rate with a good one and now I’m down to around 40% without one. Now I’m trying to figure out what are some good “calls to action” to get visitor moving through the site.

You need more info in order to make a decision. If you have a blogsite, of course your bounce rate will be lower: people will scroll down to see the images. That is not a good indicator if a splash page is affecting your viewer or not. Even Travis said that one of the sites was 80% and the other one was %40. Both of them had splash pages. It could be that one of them brings in people that were looking for something else. My point: don’t make changes for the sake of it (it seems that Travis is doing it the right way by keeping a site with for control and comparing results).

With Google’s Website Optimizer you can create multiple landing pages and compare their effectiveness in a somewhat scientific manner.

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Biggest problem with splash pages: FLASH

Especially for people with slower computers, and older macs, flash is stuttery at best, and makes them wait just that much longer to get in.
The truly annoyed, like myself, have implemented flash blockers like ‘click-to-flash’ so that ads etc. are blocked and pages load faster and your browser doesn’t bog down your machine. However, this can create snafus with splash pages and getting to you real pages.

Now for someone like myself who has widely different areas of services offered (not just photography) and needs to direct people to their desired area, I have to use a splash page or it looks like I’m some amateur DIY’er who’s trying to make a quick buck. With a little optimization, though, individual service areas hit well on Google searches.

Splash pages are just another click to get to the info they really want. If your site is divided into different sections, good navigation will take care of hand-holding them there. I haven’t used a splash page since 2000.

Here’s the problem with eliminating html splash pages all together for all flash sites — lower search rankings. If your prospects can’t find you in the search results, bounce rates don’t seem to matter as much. My photography studio client had an all flash website that was getting overlooked by Google. We were on the second or third results page for our local category — unacceptable. Before we added a splash page, Google Analytics showed our bounce rate as almost 90%! We lost so much traffic while our flash site loaded for a couple of seconds. So we added a splash page with key information, logo and a few photos. Right away, we noticed a drop in our bounce rate to the low 40% range, and with careful keywords/description and little thinking, we are now consistently in the top 4 Google search results for our category. Wish I knew more about SEO, but this has been our experience!