Are splash pages necessary?

[Anderson]

What are Flash designs much loved by people around the world? It’s mainly due to the interactive elements like video, audio and animation. Flash components are used by a lot of web designers. <o></o>
There are many expert flash web designers around the world. To know about expert designers you can do a web search using the keyword flash design brisbane, as Brisbane designers are considered to the one of the best web designers in the world.<o></o>
One of the biggest mistakes that people do while designing flash sites is the addition of splash pages. <o></o>
A splash page is the page of a website that the user sees first, before proceeding to the main content. <o></o>
A splash page will have attractive graphics or a Flash movie, along with a link to click and enter the website. Nowadays you can see a lot of websites with splash pages. <o></o>
Splash pages may add beauty to the site, but are not promoted by most of the designers. Here are a few reasons behind it. <o></o>
Your home page should convey all the relevant details about the website, in the minimum time. A splash page creates an extra step for the visitors, making the process tougher. Web surfers won’t spend extra time on any website, and hence may leave your site soon. <o></o>
A pretty picture on the splash page may take way the possible search engine ranking. As the search engines give a lot of importance for your home page, make sure that the home page is content rich, and includes the targeted keywords. If you have a splash page, the search engine virtually has nothing to index, and hence may affect your page rank. <o></o>
Read more about splash pages from the online articles in the websites of leading web designing companies. This will help you to understand the harmful effects of splash pages <o></o>

[Rantz]

Uh, I think this thread was probably made for advertising, but I'll just remove the link and leave it open because any criticism towards splash pages is valid discussion. They're a HORRIBLE idea.

[Xaven]

Fat fat fast splash pages are annoying, but splash pages for multinational entities (like Yamaha) or something are fine. Choose your country/ area of interest. It depends on what's there, though usually there ain't much there at all. :P

I admire your craft, Anderson.

[Pheesh]

There's usually a 'skip this' button in case it's taking too long to load or something though, right? They can be classy, or they can be annoying, depends how it's done.