The Splash Page What drives you crazy on a splash page? Could it be the spinning logo, talking CEO, and swirling graphics that tell you nothing and absorb your time? Upper management views the splash page as the "electronic cover of the electronic brochure." These people reign high enough in the organization that they have (a) decision-making power and (b) no clue about what properly belongs on a home page. Splash pages are intuitively a tool of the devil. Gunkelmans Interior Design (www.gunkelmans.com) is as good an example as any of what a bad splash page is.

Apparently, R. Thomas Gunkelman didn't listen when he was advised not to name his company eponymously. He also didn't hear when somebody told him that he shouldn't make his Web site an all-Flash extravaganza. On top of that, there's no way for R. Thomas to tell just how bad an idea this is. You have to enter and go to the next page before you find the "Skip Intro" button.

Matt Cutler came up with the extremely well named skip factor. A quick search on Google recently found about 208,000 instances of the phrase "Skip Intro"-you're sure to come up with many more. How on earth can a company feel a Flash splash page is a good idea when they all know they have to add the Skip Intro button to it? Matt described the skip factor this way in an article in Business 2.0 (May 15, 2001):

A Web site's design reinforces either the perception that a company has a solid e-strategy or that it doesn't know what it is doing. And when a company incorporates Flash graphics software into the design, well, it has arrived.

But the story shouldn't end there. The impact of a Flash introduction diminishes over time. The presentation may wow visitors for the first few viewings, but it may forever annoy them after the tenth. The key is to show it only to folks who want to see it. To ensure that this occurs, measure the number of visitors who watch the Flash intro versus the number who click "Skip intro."

A skip factor of less than 25 indicates visitors are watching the Flash intro, while a factor greater than 80 shows visitors are skipping it. A low skip factor is likely attributable to a high number of first-time visitors, while a high skip factor indicates that most visitors have already seen the Flash intro-and that they don't want to see it again.

The skip factor should be recalculated separately for new and repeat visitors. If the factor is high for new visitors, the company might want to rethink its Flash design. If too many repeat visitors skip the intro, consider showing it only to first-timers. Then, when users return, they will automatically be routed to your home page.

The skip factor can apply to other types of content as well, and managing the content on your site from the visitor's perspective is a lot like pain management in hospitals.

If you've ever had a nurse ask you to describe your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, you have my deepest sympathies. If you've ever given birth to a child, you know what a 10 feels like. If you've ever tried to find, compare, and buy anything online, you know how Web surfing easily becomes Web suffering.

But how do you know how painful your site is to visitors? For starters, keep an eye on whether people bother reading your pages. One worldwide information services and technology company does just that. In an interview, one of its Web managers shared some common sense:

Obviously if we see pages that are not being visited we either get rid of them or modify them. We learn things, such as people don't download .pdf files. We make it a part of our standards law. They can still put .pdf files in there, but part of our file guides say, "don't expect people to read these. The only reason for a .pdf file is if you really expect someone to print it off and read it on an airplane." They're not going to read it on the Web.

The Landing Page

So you're watching the home page and you're limiting the Flash flood-good. Now, don't forget about those pages you have specifically designed to be welcome mats: the landing page. Banners, promotional email, and even print and broadcast ads point to these pages. The advertising is vitally interested in these pages because they help identify whether people are actually clicking through, rather than simply clicking to. Do these people in fact land on your site?

But the same care and feeding that goes into your home page should be lavished on these side-door pages as well. So many things on a landing page will determine whether visitors leave, stay, dig deeper, stay longer, sign up, join in, leave an opinion, make an appointment, or yes, even buy something.

So take all of the following advice about navigation and apply it to your home page and your landing pages first. Don't think of these pages as the gateways to your site. They're the brick walls. They are the barrier between your customers and what they want. These pages are the firewall between your visitors and what you want them to do.

The Beam-Me-Up-Scotty Page

Search engines, favorites bookmarks, editorial links, and emailed URLs will allow your visitors to walk right through the walls of your fine establishment and end up you-know-notwhere.

Are you ready for them?

These are sometimes the most mysterious statistics of all. Why is there a spike in people going to the hose-and-couplings page of your hydraulics parts and service section? Some answers are found in your referrer logs, but links that are sent from friends to friends or show up in an association handout at an annual meeting will remain mysteries. More than one marketing manager has told me that they get more traffic when their competitors fire up a big promotion. Their audience becomes interested in the offer-and the alternatives.

Understanding what drives traffic to strange pages deep in your Web site is less a matter of log files and more a matter of astrology, Ouija boards, and spirit channeling. The sticks-andstones part of this issue is whether you're watching how people navigate from the nonobvious entry pages on your site as well as the obvious places. They are just as capable of being the first step in what will become your customer experience.

Customer experience is not the process and procedure you have in place, it's not the awardwinning design your graphic artists have conjured up, and it's not the form you need filled out to satisfy the sales force automation tool, the customer support database, and those folks down in accounting. Customer experience is what an individual goes through while trying to accomplish a specific task. Accomplishing that task begins with what your site visitor actually sees.