Writers – Skip the Splash Page
July 18, 2007 by Anne Wayman
Filed under Jobs
As many of you know, I firmly believe every single writer ought to have their very own website. It’s a perfect way to promote yourself and the kind of work you do. It’s cheap these days and, even without and coding skills, possible to do yourself. It’s also fairly cheap to hire someone to do it for you.
That said, you’ve got to focus on your potential clients as your putting your site together. Sure, you’re talking about you… but the potential client has a problem they are trying to solve. You want your site to demonstrate that you can make their lives easier.
The client has got to be able to move easily into your site without any barrier at all, find out what they want to find out about you and be able to contact you easily by email, snail mail and phone.
Splash intro pages – those lovely or funny moving presentations that require the user to click to enter have no place on the front of writers’ websites. Think about it… they require me, the potential client, to click to enter. Why would I want to?
It’s even worse when I come back a second, third or fourth time… I have to click to get where I want to go. And potential clients do come back multiple times before making a decision to contact you. Make it easy for them… so easy they can hardly resist.
You’re a Writer – You Need a Website! is an article that tells you why you need one and gives you an overview of how to get one.
Write well and often,
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I agree. Gratuitous splash pages are annoying. At the very least, make the splash page non-flash. “No Flash On Splash”. Sure, it looks fancy. It probably took a while to program it. But it doesn’t actually serve a purpose.
Another big no-no in my book is including audio or video that loads up automatically. Music, interviews, flash video – all of that slows down people’s machines (even sometimes makes it impossible to load a site), gets in the way of the information I’m trying to reach, and interrupts my iTunes music. Having it available is fine (hey, we’ve all got different learning styles), but having it start up upon page load just makes you look needy.
This is one of the main reasons I don’t like MySpace pages. Sound and too much damn crap all over the page. Simple is better. Especially for writers. People who want to know about writers like to read. Give them something they can read. Makes them think of your books, and how easy your books are to read too.
Think – easy on the eyes, easy on the cpu. That’s how a website should be, especially for a website that we expect people to come back to on a regular basis.
I totally agree. Splash and flash pages are hugely irritating to me and in my opinion, irrelevant. Sometimes they prevent readers from getting to the site at all. I was completely locked out of one site, and when I sent a message pointing this out, was told to download flash or to forget about it. I couldn’t even get the URL of a page past the intro, so that I could get into the site without seeing the intro. I couldn’t even guess the URL correctly. This company does not care to talk to people like me!
Great post Anne and I totally agree. Unless you’re a graphic designer who needs to show off their skills, I’d stay away from splash pages and any extra page that someone has to navigate through in order to get to the meat of the site.
I’m not sure a splash page even works for graphics designers… it’s a barrier to entry.