Flash Intro "How-to"

Help with small flash intro screen

[RichmondJim]

I have created a very small (3 second) flash intro that is simply our company name that appears in the middle of the screen and fades out.

How can I make this an Intro to our site, that would then send the webuser to the actual home page? I tried the GETURL() function within swish, but it opens the homepage in a new window instead of using the one that the intro has finished running in.

I am using FrontPage 2002 if you have specific instructions for this editor.

Thanks in advance,
Jim

[RichmondJim]

Is this task THAT difficult? 3 days on the forum, and no one has an answer?

[mat_bastian]

Try this to open in the same window:

getURL("http://yoururl.com", "_self");

[grey259]

A Flash intro will harm your traffic. It gives potential visitors an additional chance to say "good-bye" before getting to your content.

[mattur]

As grey says, it's a bad idea. It was briefly popular a few years ago among some graphic designers, but for most sites it will:

a) encourage a large proportion of visitors to leave your site immediately

b) waste the most important URL on your site: the homepage

c) make your site look dated and unprofessional

d) annoy the heck out of return visitors

An alternative would be to provide a link like "See Flash Intro here". Then after a week or two, when you check your stats and realise that hardly anyone views it, you can remove it and get back to concentrating on your content... ;)

[richardb]

A few points

>> getURL("http://yoururl.com", "_self")
or
getURL("http://yoururl.com", "_top")will get you out of any frames

>> A Flash intro will harm your traffic. It gives potential visitors an additional chance to say "good-bye" before getting to your content.

But it does depend upon your TM, for some markets the opposite is true.

>>b) waste the most important URL on your site: the homepage

Yeap, would agree wastes a lot of good ops, don't use it as a splash page, incorporate into the site design, if See TM comments

>>c) make your site look dated and unprofessional

? Well done it can improve it. See TM comments

>>d) annoy the heck out of return visitors

?

Rich

[Sinner_G]

>>d) annoy the heck out of return visitors

?

How would you like it if you had to see the same animation of a logo (which gives you absolutely NO added value/information) for the fifth time in as many visits of the site?

[ppg]

If you must do it, just make sure you have a 'skip intro' link!

It might be short, but 3 seconds is long enough for me to realise there's no 'skip intro' and hit the back button.