In my time as a web developer, I have been asked do all sorts of things - including flashy intro home pages and entrance pages with no information on it or coded text other than and ‘Enter Here’ button. I have tried my best to bat these off and not touch them if I could help it.

Why? Isn’t the customer always right? Sometimes the client will know their industry better than I will. Is it not my job to try my best to understand their industry to be able to provide them with a website that will out perform their rivals and compete with the best in the business? Yes so I will listen and gleam as much as I am able to from them. Turn the coin over and should the client, if they have asked me to do work for them, trust that I am running a successful business because I am an expert in my field? Yes and in turn trust that the things that I suggest will not be extra work for me so that I can earn a quick buck or two, but to add value where I can to the work I have been tasked with.

When a client asks for a flash into page as a home page, most of the time I will say no. It will have a detrimental effect on the health of the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of the site and I build sites to a high SEO standard from the get go. The 1 or 2% of people that I think it is useful for would be the companies or advertising agencies putting up a TV advert online for people to see or the fact that SEO is of no worry to them because the site will only be up for 2/3 months for a product launch. No problems. If the client is wanting a new website with a flash intro or doorway page and SEO is a high priority for them then ‘No-way-Jose!’

Having a flash file and no text on the homepage in any search engines brain says, ‘There’s no text here, it’s not important enough for me to spend any time here, there are no links for me to follow and neither should my search engine visitors.’ Thus resulting in the site being of little importance and only appearing on page 10, 11, 12 or higher of any SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

If you are building a new site and you do this in it’s infancy - even if the site will have 100% direct traffic and the client is not interested in SEO - in the end it will result in them spending £100’s if not £1000’s on SEO in the future to fix this and get the search engines liking the site again when they realise that they are missing out on a potential 70% market share of consumers who make buying decisions from page one results of search engines.

On the complete flip side, I have also been asked by clients to have home pages that contain all the information on their company and what they do. This way, in their eyes, when a customer visits their site they will know all about the services on offer, what they do and they can make an informed decision from that. I have tried avoiding this also.

Customer journey is key to the success of any website. Before getting head down into Photoshop or code, pencil drawings and flow diagrams of the site are the first step. Understanding fully the structure of the site, the loose headlines or titles about the content required together with how you are going to lead people to buy off your site, fill in your contact form or subscribe to your email newsletters is the way to start.

Getting a balance between the flash intro page and the cluttered mess of many home pages is a tricky and fine balancing act. You should never put 100% of what your product is about on your home page - if people come on read it and are not interested then they click off. This is called a bounce - hitting your site and going no further than the home page. Not having traffic driven to other pages of your site will decrease the ranking and importance of it together with not really engaging your customer correctly - will they come back?

Imagine if I were a cheese wholesaler and I made all my cheeses available on one page to buy. Knowing I have 1000’s of different cheeses limits what I could be doing for my customers. They would have to read through the whole list to buy and it would not be a great experience for them. Suppose that I get lots of sales for French soft cheeses and hard Swiss cheese, English soft cheese with fruit and oak smoked Bavarian cheese. This means that I could categorise them. I could have separate pages on the site to add value to my customers experience. I could put information on the region that the cheese was made in, the ingredients, the methods used. And I could even categorise it by country, hard or soft and even the fruity ones.

What is this all leading to then and why am I saying all this?

Having an flash intro entrance or doorway page for your site reduces the SEO hugely and in the same breath, I am letting people know I don’t want to build nasty sites that you will have to spend loads of money again when you want it to be found in the SERP’s for competitive search results. That’s not what I am in business for.

Entrance pages, doorway pages or a completely flash based website can not be read fully by the search engine spiders and they can not follow any links from the page, therefore reducing the importance of the site and never really giving it a chance.

Think about your customer experience. Lead them through your site. Every page should lead to another and ultimately lead to a sale or them filling in your contact form - what ever you have set you site up to do in the first place.

Don’t look for the cowboys out there that build your site in old school tables with text in images. Get someone on board for you next web project that do things right. Ask about W3C standards and WCAG accessibility testing. Get those on board that are looking to add value to your business where possible.

And finally… what ever you do give it time. Don’t look for quick fixes and false promises of getting you to number one on Google. You should be there for your company name anyway! Quiz the SEO guys and girls about getting your site up there for competitive search terms and ask them what they think about flash landing pages and overly clutters home pages. Getting this done is not an overnight job and can take 6 to 12 months for you to see an effect.