Splash, introduction pages, agreement pages, and just about anything else that stops you from getting to the content fast should be stripped from your website. Believe it or not, some people don’t care about how much money, or your skills in flash introductions, they actually come to your website not for the introduction but the actual content.
The initial use of the internet is to communicate. Communication can mean anything from sharing your files to chatting to your buddy on an IM application. Websites are like a document online, with hyperlinks and have transformed to be visually appealing. Even though we have added fancy text, text with shadows, and frogs which talk, the initial purpose of the webpage has not changed.
When you start your website there is many questions to ask your self like the title of the site, but the most important question is; ‘What is your website about?’, and ‘What is its purpose?’
I am going to do this with this website so you can see how planning works. This website is about Website Development and technologies. Its purpose is to educate and deliver content to the user about this. The key words – again this is debatable but for this paragraph – are deliver and content. Other sites may want to deliver another type of format of information, such as music, PDFs, applications and what ever else exists on the internet. Since our main priority is to deliver this content, delaying it is just contradicting the sites purpose.
The problems…
Remember that websites are not a movie; people do not need to be introduced through an animation which usually has nothing to do with what they are looking for. In fact if I was to put a Splash page on this site, and introduce other content on this site how long would it take to go through the whole splash? Even just the content from just last month would take a while to go through.
Many people create Splash pages with out putting a skip introduction link, which makes it impossible to get the content with out waiting. Or if they do put a link to skip the introduction, they incorporate it in their presentation which is usually a third-party plug-in, or Active-X control which many users (including me) disable it because it wastes to much – bandwidth (mine and theirs), time, processing power, security and space – so if some one doesn’t have flash enabled what are they going to see, a blank page with a Download Plug-in message in the middle.
I intentionally come late to movies at cinemas to miss opening titles and all the crap. Imagine a user coming back to your website again and again, and having to click skip all the time.
Haven’t I ever heard of the cookie?
You’re probably wondering “but you can prevent users from seeing the same message over and over by using a cookie?” The con’s is to this;
most some of the user’s browsers reject cookies a- anti-spy ware software deletes cookies
- cookies expire –there’s ways out of this.
So no matter what you cannot cover the whole community of users, because not all users have cookies, have them enabled or keep them.
Imagine going to Google to search and you had to go through a presentation of what Google is, or its new features. There are better ways to illustrate content with out having a splash screen. Remember your initial purpose of your site.
Not convinced?
If you use Active-X, a third party application or a client side scripted script application, make sure that there is away around this to get to your content or your site. If your site is completely in Java, Flash or another plug-in Active X object
always provide an alternative, for accessibility purposes and search engine optimization.
Use cookies to redirect users after they have seen the presentation once, make sure the skip intro link always visible. If you are using flash, put the non-html page first and then use flash to redirect the user on the first frame. The purpose of this is so that you do not need to use a Client Side Script to check if the user has Flash, flash will redirect the user to your full flash object/page/movie/splash and if there is no flash then it cannot redirect, and you do need to put of search engines and other users because they be at the feet of the content.
I spent ages or allot of money to get this intro done… I don’t want to get rid of it
If you wish to show off your skills, I’m sure that 100% your audience or your future audience (which isn’t able to view your website due to its poor accessibility) doesn’t care or appreciate of your skills or wants to know or see how much money you spent creating this intro, or that it looks really good. If you must put a link on webpage to a splash page – this defeats the purpose of it to be the first thing but I don’t see a need for it at all.
I Agree/Disagree
If you need users to agree to content for what ever reason it is, you can get around this with disclaimers which are still visible to the user. If your site needs to have an I agree or Disagree chances are its not going to help you at all in court, and if you’re providing that sort of content you are probably using the internet for all the wrong reasons. Another alternative to this is making the page per membership so the user agrees once they log-in, the agreement is agreed through a contract which they accepted when they joined your site.
More Incorrect uses of the Splash Page
A splash page is not an about page, or an about us page, and it is nether a
FAQ pages or a privacy policy. These all have their right full places, and because you are using the splash page incorrectly – though I just stated there is no correct uses, the questions are still going to be asked, people will not know what your on about, and the people who do know what it’s about get frustrated because their wasting there time bandwidth etc. on junk that they have seen before.
Your opinions on this are appreciated comment below – even comment if you think their good I would like to know why.
Other
a I said this because when you are using Internet Explorer, which allot of users use because of x reasons, it blocks cookies with its ‘Privacy Report’ this site you may of noticed picks up cookies for one of the external stats programs
August 29th, 2005
Avoid Using JavaScript Writing Titles
You may of seen this example in one of the previous articles.
<title><script type="text/javascript">
document.write("Printing JavaScript Titles Using
JavaScript"); </script></title>
I do not recommend this because when you look in a search engine your results come up like this;
document.write(' '); var MYHAWEMEA_LANG=""; var ...
document.write(''); else document.write(''); function
showpage(strpage) {
window.open(myhaeurl ...
else if(MYHAWEMEA_SHOWFAQLINK == "PM"){ document.write(' ...
Use server side scripting like PHP do to the same thing
You Could Do the same thing with this code.
echo('<head>' '<title>Printing JavaScript Titles Using
JavaScript</title>');
</head>
The code is much smaller and the source code isn’t made available for the user because it’s generated by the server.
The same problems go for meta elements. You can find many sites which come up by search engines with this problem. Though now some search engines such as Google have advanced they still do not generate everything for their own reasons.
Alternative using JavaScript
You Could Try Doing Using This
document.write("<title>Printing JavaScript Titles Using JavaScript
</title>");
Why use this Because the search engine can still get information out of the document.
The Previous Way
The SearchBot May See All the Scripting
...<title><script type="text/javascript">document.write('This Is What The Search Engine Sees')</script></title>...
Alternative Method
The SearchBot Will Just Pull Out Whats Between The Title Tags
...<script type="text/javascript">document.write('<title>'This Is What The Search Engine Sees</title>')</script>...
At least using the alternative method your site is better exposed to more primative search bots.
August 29th, 2005
We all know computer programs that run on a computer are commonly referred to as software right? If not look software up on Wiki-Pedia. If you are ever in serious doubt try Google, there should be a page or forum that could help you or at least send you in the right direction.
Remember all those Zeros and Ones?
All computers directly use there own Machine Language. Machine Language is the computers native language and is defined by its hardware. Machine languages ultimately are just zeros and ones, which is just off and on’s (0 being off -false, and 1 being on -true) Think of a computer that started like this, which just a basic If Statement, 0 and 1. If the computer is on it is one, if it is off it is 0, then the computers go into other statements, until after years and decades if not more one day, they become so complex there is so many 0’s and 1’s. Each computers native language, is unique depending on the hardware of its self – I’ll elaborate on this, each computer will have different hardware (yes the physical stuff) thus there native code will be defined off this and will always be different.
There are basically three different types of programming languages. They are:
- Machine languages (above)
- Assembly languages (next)
- High-level languages (lastly)
You could imagine all those zeros and ones would be come annoying for anybody to translate into something logical so as computers became more popular, programmers evolved (just like the cavemen) instead of programmers using the computers machine-language, they started using native language. Native or natural language is to represent elementary operations of a computer. Simply, another way of thinking of it, the word plus is just a short cut for the binary of +. It was created so we could see the code easier and speed up the process of computers.
What is assembly programming?
Assembly programming is a group of those “shortcuts” as I mentioned above in a bit more detail, each of these shortcuts hold the machine language code. So computer programmers see words, but now you are wondering how does the computer know what these words are? Well this would require some sore of translator wouldn’t it?
Assemblers
Assemblers are translating programs for assembly languages. As I also mentioned above, how could a computer understand what the program is talking about if it’s programmed with shortcuts, the shortcuts are translated into those zero’s and one’s we talked about (binary code or machine language)
With this great invention of Assembly, computer languages took a greatly less time to program in, and computer programmers where on a rise. Because computers where getting better, programmers wanted more – but because they where limited to so many statements because assembly was so primitive. They started to group statements together, and started to create high-level programs. All high-level programs seamlessly get translated either directly or indirectly through assemblers to binary.
As high-level language increased very fast the use of indirect translating took a considerable amount of computer processing time, in order to fix this, direct Interpreter programs were developed to execute high-level programs directly with out the need to compile them into machine language.
Depending on your OS, or interpreter, some interpreting programs take longer to process then the other; the newer developed programming languages for different OS some times use better and more modern methods from the start to convert code into binary.
This is why Mac’s are bettera
Since Mac where always the same, there OS is built around their software, it hardly changes so they can get the parts which help the computer run more efficiently, they save of case and if statements because all outcomes are more availably known then in generically produced computers – the generic PC aka IBM. The OS which is all created by the same person then can interpret the code better because they know the most efficient ways to code, and there you have it, where everything is run strictly, and coordinated by one it can go through twice as many processes then everybody else’s one. There are problems with a Mac, but I’m not going to start a fight on it.
End Notes: a Open to debate, not on my site don’t bother.
August 29th, 2005