Flash Doorway Pages for Band Websites?

We’ve received a few letters from clients, who asked whether we could program a Flash intro page for them, to appear as the hompage of their MyBandTheme powered band site.

Flash intro pages, also known as doorway pages, serve the purpose of having a pretty animation appear to the user, before they are finally taken to the content filled part of the website. These doorway pages were popular in the early 2000′s, when lots of sites were built on purely Flash.

Things change though, technology advances, and trends die off.

We generally don’t really recommend having Flash doorway pages for a number of reasons:

• It’s not advantageous from an SEO point of view, since the first page a search engine spider sees of your site, is an empty page. Search engine spiders can’t index animations, and thus view the page as empty.
• Mobile browsing is the mainstream trend nowadays. Flash does not render at all on iPhones and iPads, and inconsistently and very slowly on Android based smart-phones.
• Flash doorway pages have no added benefit to the user, and they usually just press the Skip intro link anyway. Why have something programmed that your visitors aren’t even interested in?
• Flash can load slowly on PCs, which can greatly worsen the user experience of your visitor while on your site.

Alternative to a Flash doorway page

The home page of MyBandTheme powered sites was designed to give a great first impression to the user, without the need for any Flash. The oversized featured slider is key in getting the WOW factor from your visitor, which means that you have to choose the big slider images very carefully.

If you can place great images onto the featured slider, you’ll get the first impression you’re looking for, without the need for any Flash.