You’d think by now that designers and developers would have cottoned on to the fact that ’entry’ pages serve no purpose whatsoever, but alas this isn’t the case. You know what I mean by an entry page - they are usually created in flash, take an age to load, and then offer you the choice to ’skip’ once you are bored of waiting, or have seen it too many times!

Twice this week, I have stumbled upon such pages and wondered just what goes through the mind of the designer or marketer when they dream up such wonderfully animated collections of colours, words, video and sound.

"That will stun our customer into believing we are the best", they think as they busy themselves with that all important wow factor. "Our website will win awards" the marketers tell their CEOs to justify the extra budget they’ve just spent. "If that doesn’t get them spending with us, nothing will"

Let’s pull apart those myths and talk about just how 90s and pointless entry pages are.

Here are my ’pros and cons’ of the entry page:

Pros
err.........

Cons
where do I start?

OK, first things first - When your customer comes to your website either directly or from a search engine, they are coming for a purpose...they want INFORMATION. They don’t want to see swirling thing-a-me-bobs with unsubstantiated statements such as  "the UK’s largest stock of..." flying across the screen. Let them in for pity’s sake.

Secondly, you must know your intro is boring, too long and pointless if you put a ’skip’ button on it in the first place!

Three. If you spent as much on good search engine optimisation (which, by the way, we are great at!) you would reap many more rewards and could then fully justify the expense to your CEO. And, there is nothing more damaging to optimisation than an entry page - apart from no thought of optimisation at all that is!

Number 4, well, to be honest, I am boring myself just thinking about entry pages.

Do yourself a favour... never use one, never let anyone bully you into one, don’t listen to the expert who tells you it won’t affect your SEO - he clearly isn’t - and last but not least, if you insist you want Media Creative to build you one, read this article again!