Help my friend make a big splash!

January 5, 2011 12:18 PM

A friend has a really big event that is very important to her career, and she wants to replace her website home page with a splash screen displaying all the information about this very special event. I have a question about how to accomplish this.

The splash screen is designed, and I want to put it up on her site but I'm not sure about a few things.
1. A timed re-direct to her old home page won't work, because there is too much information about the event on the splash screen, and it would be hard to gauge how long people need to spend on the page, so I plan to just have a link to her existing home page on the splash screen.
2. Her current home page is just index.html. Do I just rename that something else, and call the splash screen index.html?
3. Is there anyway to do this so that if you have been to the splash screen once, and then you click one of her old 'home' links from inside the existing website, it directs you to the existing (i.e. old) home page, not the new splash screen every time? I definitely don't want to have to go through her site and change every link to the home page to accomplish this.

p.s. I'm aware that some people despise splash screens, no need to go there with your comments.

posted by samoa to computers & internet (5 answers total)

You can do this by throwing a layer on top of the index.html. Put your entire splash screen in a layer, and clicking the layer itself would "close" (hide) the layer.
posted by Sallysings at 12:27 PM on January 5, 2011

If you are working within dreamweaver you can do a "change links site wide" to change all instances of index.html to index-sub.html (or whatever you call it) THEN rename the current index to index-sub.html, then create the splash page and name it index
posted by dadici at 12:27 PM on January 5, 2011

Sallysings (or anyone) can you link to a tutorial or guide for how I might code that layer? That seems like a good idea. (although the splash screen is large enough it would need to scroll in some browsers, can layers scroll?)

dadiciI'm not working within dreamweaver. Plus, I think some of her sub pages (i.e. examplesite.com/about/) are also called index.html, just like her home page.
posted by samoa at 12:38 PM on January 5, 2011

To implement Sallysings' way, you probably want to look at Lightbox/Greybox tools -- Javascript-based "popup" window used for images, modal dialog boxes, etc. If you find one that can support iFrames, you can code the new page as a standalone HTML file, and just load it as an overlay.

If you go this route, consider how you want to handle users without Javascript enabled. And confirm that it works as desired on mobile devices, iPads, etc.

I might also look at doing a conditional redirect from her current "index.html" to the new "splash.html", for users who have not yet seen the splash screen (and once they have, set a cookie to not show it again?). And then do a site-wide "notice bar" across the top of all pages on the site to allow people to re-discover the splash page (or learn of it if they follow a link to a sub-page)
posted by misterbrandt at 1:01 PM on January 5, 2011

Good point misterbrandt re: allowing people to re-discover the splash page. I will keep that issue in mind.
posted by samoa at 1:05 PM on January 5, 2011