Splash and Flash – Use with Care

No matter what time of the year it is, websites will try to promote their businesses with attractive offers and discounts to try to reel you in for a sale. As a result of that, many companies are busy  getting new splash pages designed to announce their fabulous discounts and new products in a way no can ignore. Splash pages help websites protect the integrity of the website and at the same time it allows them to announce to their customers and visitors the good things they have to offer. While many people think of splash pages only in relation to holiday sales, you can use them in a number of creative ways.

Here is the thing to keep in mind about splash pages though – if you are not careful you can make your website unfriendly to the search engines. Because splash pages are often developed using Flash and Flash is not at all SEO friendly. It takes a long time to load and search and even though they can look quite sophisticated on your screen, they look like junk to Google bots. What do you do about? Is it OK to have strong optimized pages loading quickly and then just that one bump in the road? The popular, and right answer, is no.

You would want your splash page to be impressive, but you can easily aggravate visitors to your site if you don’t pay attention. Heavy splash pages not only will make your website unfriendly to search engines, they also become less user friendly. There is really no reason to create a heavy splash page that takes a long time to load. People want to get in, find what they want, and get on to the next thing. If you insist on a Flash splash page, make it light.

Never compromise on the usability of your website as this can affect your sales level. The last thing you would want is drop in the sales. You can also lose your existing ranking because of the slow loading page that you have introduced with the intention of promoting your sales. This will not only affect your holiday sales but also your long terms sales chart. So think twice and review several times before you add your splash page to the website because you would certainly not want to do anything to lose ranking that can easily be avoided.

If your website and product are brand new, then it is best not to use splash pages at all. Unintentionally, your splash page may work against your own goals. Always take into consideration long term repercussions of your efforts because if something goes wrong, it will take a long time to bounce to your original status. It is best to discuss with your SEO company before you make any major changes that include Flash or little/no crawl able text on the page to get an idea of how much damage may be done.