Why not a
"splash page"?

A "splash page" is a "welcome" page, like the title page of a book, the first thing seen by visitors to your site. Most are designed to impress the visitor with how cool you are before sending them to the real content.

But splash pages generally have negative effects. Studies have shown that over 25% of all visitors turn away from splash pages and never actually enter the main site.

Why? Because a splash page is one more step keeping the customer from getting the information he is looking for. The average attention span for a web surfer is measured in mere seconds, and many surfers won't wait or endure the extra step before they decide to leave the page.

If a "skip" button is provided for the visitors to bypass the splash page, it is STILL one more step between the customer and the information, and many visitors will fail to see see the button or link and become confused or frustrated.

These issues assume that the web surfer has found your page. Since splash pages are generally not content-related, most search engines will have no content to be indexed. Google and other engines may ignore your website if you are using a splash page. By using splash pages, your website could be very difficult to locate in a web search. Everybody knows just about how terribly cool you are … now let them get directly to you instead of pushing them farther away.