If you were with us last time, we were discussing the numbering of a product called Studio Enterprise by Component One.  I raised some concerns about their versioning scheme, stating that it likely would raise lots of confusion among their userbase.  This time, I’d like to focus on a splash page on their site that is advertising this product.  Again, let me make the disclaimer that I am not reviewing the product itself or making any claims about it being good or bad.  I’m simply using the advertising on their site as a lesson in web design.

Since there’s a good chance the page will eventually come down or change (as it is, after all, advertising a product labeled “2009″, and the last time I checked, we were well into the year 2010), here is a small screenshot of the splash page in question (if this link does eventually kick the metaphorical bucket, just imagine this image blown up to 960 pixels wide and 1050 pixels tall):

Artistically, it’s kind of cool and employs a 1950s retro sci-fi vibe.  Whether that helps or hurts the product is up for debate, though. The programmers that ultimately would be the end users of this tool might really dig it (after all, what programmer doesn’t have a little geek in them?), though Mr. or Mrs. Senior Executive that ultimately pays the bills might be discouraged and instead keep looking for something that has that certain “professional IT” look to it.

Regardless, implementing a splash page like this can be bad for several reasons:

• They can take a long time to load.
• Some may only slightly resemble an actual web page, and users may be confused or discouraged when clicking in certain places on the screen does not result in the expected behavior.
• They aren’t as accessible as a proper web page, and people with certain disabilities may not be able to use/read the screen.
• They take the page’s content out of the underlying HTML, which searches engines may not understand (Flash content has historically had a similar problem).

Let’s go through each point in depth.

Page load time

Splash pages can often take a long time to load, and when a page takes longer than a few seconds to display, your potential readers, users, and/or customers are very likely bolting for the virtual door and heading to a different site.  Let’s look at Component One’s splash page advertising Studio Enterprise.  On my fast broadband connection at home, it took a good 8 seconds to fully load!  That is way longer than what a good page should take.  A big bulk of your potential site viewers won’t stick around past the 4-5 second mark.  While it’s a few years old, Akamai has an interesting article on how this affects online shoppers.

To Component One’s credit, their splash page is divided into two main images that can be downloaded simultaneously to cut down the load time. I hesitate to think how small the percentage of potential customers would stick around if it was just a single huge image! There’s still a problem, however — each image averages over 750KB in size!  That’s a nearly 1.5 MB download just to see an ad on a page, which is pretty darn insane.

Both images are PNG files, and each one appears to be saved as a high quality 32-bit image. Re-saving the images as 8-bit using the free Paint.NET utility, I was able to cut the images down to under 25% of their original size.  You lose some of the sharpness of the original image, but when your intent is to entice a custom to click on the image right away and come into your site, who is going to stick around long enough to enjoy the quality of artwork in your ad?  Certainly not the web surfers that have already left and gone on to a different site.

Splash page interaction

When a splash page is set up like Component One’s, they often lose any semblance of an interactive web page.  In the case of their ad, the images that are used to make up the page contain what look like clickable buttons:

In fact, if you hover over them, the mouse cursor turns into a hand which gives the appearance that they are indeed clickable. However, upon closer inspection, each of the two images making up the page are entirely clickable!

Rather cleverly, they’ve placed the “buttons” in the above picture right along the middle of the page, which is the dividing point of the images.  “Download free trial” falls just above the border of the two images, and “Learn more” falls just under it. As it turns out, each image is actually a link to a specific page on their site.  Not surprisingly, clicking on the top half of the page takes you to a download page, and clicking on the bottom half of the page takes you to a Studio Enterprise overview page.

So how is this bad when the “links” basically work?  For starters, modern web design conventions are being ignored.  Hovering over the “buttons” doesn’t change the color or style of the buttons to indicate that you should click on them.  There’s other text on the page too:

Why don’t these words have their own context-specific links? As a user, I might assume that clicking on “scheduling” will take me to the overview of a scheduling product, and when I see that this is not the case, I may move on to another site.

Accessibility

Can blind web users that utilize screen readers make sense of the page?  There’s no alt text set up for the images on the page for such a user to know what they are viewing. The “buttons” mentioned above are in no way identifiable to such a user.

Content

Building upon accessibility, Component One’s splash page inextricably mixes the content on the page with its style. There’s no way to easily update the look of it without needing to change the entirety of the content.  Now, given that the content is simply an ad for a product that will probably be replaced by a new version (and thus a new ad) in the near future, Component One probably didn’t give this issue much thought.  In fact, I’d agree that in their situation, this really isn’t that big a of a problem.

For other sites that have a permanent splash page, though, presenting the content in this way makes for a real maintenance challenge, should the site owner ever want to update the look of the page.  You either do a complete redesign, or you do nothing at all.

Conclusion

If you’re thinking you want a splash page to be the first thing a visitor sees when entering your site, then you have to carefully weight the pros and cons of doing so.  A carefully designed page should pass the above tests and not discourage potential visitors.  However, in Component One’s case, their splash page is likely turning away more potential customers than it’s luring.