One popular trend in website building is to create a Flash intro, which is an introductory screen that contains animation. These intros are rarely useful and are a point of frustration for site visitors.
As proof, a Marketing Sherpa study revealed that “80% of web site users hate Flash intros.” As a rule, the web is an interactive medium where visitors naturally expect to navigate a web site and find the information they are looking for. Web users expect choices, not to be spoon-fed content that probably is not be useful to them.
Take a look at the First Capital Funding web site. In the first 8 seconds of the Flash animation, the only content that appears is their name. As reported earlier, it only takes customers 1/20th of a second to form an opinion about your web site. 80% of First Capital Funding’s customers likely left the site before the end of the Flash intro or they were aggravated when the site finally loaded 28 seconds later.
I highly recommend not including a Flash intro on your web site. Instead, work on optimizing your homepage so people instantly know a) who you are, and b) what web visitors can do on your site.
If you must include a Flash intro, make sure the intro is only a few seconds long, provide information relevant to nearly all of your customers, and give them a prominent link to skip the intro.
