Splash screens are closed doors to many. They often drive customers away in droves. (A home page generally crowded with slow loading graphics with an Enter link buried somewhere within it.) Since this is so easy to measure, it puzzles me that so many such pages remain in use. Simply count hits on home page and compare them to those on page it links to. You'll see you are slamming door in faces of many visitors, often as many as 50% of them.

Consider again example above. Consider $500 lost in closing early. Can you really afford to do this? And even if you can, why would you?

Follow The Rules

Most webmasters do try to get things right. They want to maximize sales, first to cover costs, then to grab real profits. They know better than to offend potential customers. And they know that in tossing aside even a single visitor, they may have tossed a sale.

Targeted traffic is tough to generate. Many hours and dollars disappear in this task. It only makes sense to treat every visitor you can draw as a valued and honored guest.

Here They Are

Here are "rules," or better, "practices," your visitor expects to find in place. If you have erred in any of following, fixes are needed immediately. Nothing I know of is quite as effective in evicting visitors quickly as a splash page. But some of following can toss 10% in an awful hurry. And in doing so, you are quite likely tossing those who might have shoved you into high profit zone.

Set table width at 600 pixels to prevent horizontal scroll. Limit line lengths to 65 characters for good readability. Use Arial or Verdana; never New Times Roman. Stick to black text on a white background. Use an intuitive navigation system; simple and straightforward. Minimize use of graphics for fast loading pages. Hold to complimentary colors with minimal shades of each. Be friendly to Netscape users; some now ignore them. Forget Flash or sound. Maximize impact of first screen on each page. Begin each page with a powerful emotion-grabbing headline. Provide strong sales presentations. Include pages of great content valuable to your visitors.

Go For The Big Bucks

The objective of your site is to maximize profits which draws focus to sales beyond those that cover costs. It makes sense to seek to meet needs and preferences of each and every visitor to your site. Why turn away even one with some dumb bust in site design or performance?

You can't please everybody. But more you please, more sales you'll make. And it's in those last sales made each month, that potential for significant profits lie. Be sure you have done all possible with your site to assure you make those profitable sales.

*Not easy to use - difficult to use website and website functions. Often these technical functions have most sophisticated software known to man to do a particular function like buying a train ticket. Unfortunately they didnt consider how real people actually want to use website or website functions. Big sign would read: "Oops! We were so busy enjoying doing great software bit we love, we forgot user"

*Too much text - we absolutely love to tell you how great we are/our product is. We'll try and bore you into buying our products with loads of text. Big sign would read: "Just buy our product you fool, we know best"

*"Brochureware" - existing brochure has been moved online. Token website. Does little for anyone. Looks great doesnt it?... (Not really a question, more a statement). We thought we should get a website because everyone else has one. Big sign would read: "LOOK we've got a website too!"

*Too much animation/other - extra stuff that doesnt serve any real purpose apart from distraction. We absolutely love flashing things/gadgets/buttons/scrolls/colours/fonts... more better. More an experiment than a business. Big sign would read: "Our web designer is great isnt he/she? or i should have been a programmer"

*Difficult to contact anyone - online equivalent to an electric fence. Typically employed by big corporations. Theyve gone to great lengths to make sure its very, very difficult to actually email anyone within organisation. Big sign would read: "We are far too big and rich to speak to 'the little people' who actually buy and use our products. Go away!"

Did you recognise any of these from your virtual travels on Internet? They are all present to some degree in businesses of all sizes and industries. Does your site have any of them? If so, message you are sending out to your potential customers is unlikely to help you succeed online. More likely it will have a harmful affect and direct influence on your image and reputation, customer visits and repeat visits, sales and repeat sales, company results, customer goodwill and contact, etc.

Make your site best it can be. Work at it. Ask for constructive feedback. Make a commitment to getting your website to say right things about you. It will still be paying you back long after youve done it.

Good luck!