My site (still a work in progress) has an opening page done in VSD. Then when you click on the pendant it goes to the 'shop', done in Cart Creator Pro. While I like this opening page, I wonder if people feel it's not necessary or is just one 'click' too many to get to the shop. What are your thoughts on this?
marilynweil.com

I'm no friend of spash pages, especially those who have some longish flash intro. To me it is one click too many. Sorry...

I agree with Inger, it does not really serve a purpose and one click too many. You run of a very high bounce rate i.e. people leaving directly without clicking further.

I agree also. I had one on my site for a few days and decided to take it off. Two reasons. One, it is not liked that much by the search engines, and two, I don't believe in all honesty that it looks professional. And as the others say, it is an annoying extra click to get into the site.

The biggest things I hate about splash pages is that sometimes they take forever to load, especially if they are flash pages which is what most people seem to try using all the time. Now put someone on a very slow internet connection, or something like an ipod/ipad/etc. (well ok with flash that's kind of not a good example since flash don't work for most of them, but hopefully you get the idea lol) and now I have to wait for the splash page to finish loading before I can actually get to the real page. Very very annoying as many times flash pages love to lock up your browser completely while loading so you can't do other things while waiting for it to load etc.

Definitely not worth the lost visitors in my opinion

I look at popular, professional websites. Do they have splash pages? Do they blare music at me? Do they have a visitor counter? Do they have stuff flying around the window following the mouse? Do they use hard to read fonts?

Typically, professionally built sites have none of the above. Usually, that is done by the guy who is excited about what he has learned to do, and wants to show the world what he can do.

I would think most of us have been there, done that. I can remember I had a period where I had to try out about everything I came across. I think it was when I got a copy of an early version of FrontPage. Luckily that period didn't last long, as I got flack from my friends for putting rubbish stuff on the web. It's more than a decade ago now anyway.

Maybe I was using the wrong word. Not splash page. My opening page doesn't have any flash or music. I have a feeling that no one actually looked at what I have.... www.marilynweil.com" class="bb-url"> www.marilynweil.com

@Marilyn, my thought after visiting your site is maybe some text that says 'click to enter shop' or maybe incorporate the about page into the splash page. But keep the graphic that you have now.. It might be tricky to get the text aligned with the graphic in place, but it could be really neat.
[in my opinion], a splash page is fine as long as it serves a purpose at the same time.
I have seen some really cool splash pages..

The only other thing I noticed was the menu at the bottom only.. On my olde crt monitor at 1024 x 768 the menu is hidden until I scroll the page down.

The store looks great, That's a lot of work . The product photos that I looked at were decent, which is more than I could say for some sites... That alone is a task.
All sites could use a little bit of work, looks great so far, nice job

I see the enter shop text but it's small.
The page is still a splash page you just don't get as wet.
Nice job on the site Marilyn