A Landscaper Site With a Splash Page

The site

A landscaping company with design, installation and maintenance crews. Its home page opens on a photograph filling the whole screen: a finished garden at dusk, stone steps, lit beds, a still pond.

The company's logo fades in over the photograph, letter by letter, for about four seconds. Then a button appears beneath it: Enter site.

There is nothing else. No menu, no phone number, no words about what the company does or where.

Behind the button is the real home page, at a different address, with services, a gallery and a quote form. The splash page has survived two redesigns because nobody wanted to lose the photograph.

The inference a visitor makes

Someone who searched for a landscaper arrives with two questions: does this company do what I need, and does it work where I live.

The first screen answers neither. It says the company owns a fine photograph and is in no hurry.

Some visitors read it as an old site, since splash pages went out of fashion years ago, and wonder whether the business is still trading. Others think they have reached a holding page.

Either way, the back button is nearer than the Enter button, and the next landscaper in the results shows a phone number on its first screen.

Who pays for the extra step

• New visitors from search, before they know anything.
• Customers looking for the number, every single time.
• People from the Google listing, who tapped the website link.
• Anyone holding a business card or reading the side of a truck.
• Screen reader users, who hear only that there is a link.

The second group is the one owners forget. A regular customer who wants to book spring clean-up pays the toll on every visit, for a phone number that could have taken a second.

What it costs on a phone

The photograph was sized for a wide monitor and weighs several megabytes. On mobile data it arrives slowly, and the animation waits for it.

A phone held upright shows the middle third of the picture, which here is a patch of lawn and the edge of the pond.

The Enter button sits near the bottom of the screen, in small type over a busy background, and on shorter phones it starts below the edge.

The whole sequence asks a person on a phone for patience before offering anything in return.

What it costs in search

The main address of a site is usually its strongest page in search, because it is the one other sites, directories and the Google listing link to.

Here that page holds a photograph, a logo image and two words. Its title in the code says Welcome. Google has almost nothing on it to connect the company with landscaping in its area.

The page with the useful content sits one step deeper, at a second address, with less of the strength the main address has built up.

And when the site does appear in results, the text beneath it can be little more than Enter site.

A worked example

The company decided to keep the photograph and lose everything around it.

The real home page moved to the main address, and the old inner address was redirected to it, so existing links and bookmarks still worked.

The first screen now carries one line saying what the company does and which towns it serves, the phone number as text at the top, and one button to book a site visit.

The photograph sits beside the words on a monitor and beneath them on a phone, resized to a fraction of its old weight. The animation is gone.

The page title names the services and the area. The Google listing, the cards and the trucks now send people straight to a page that answers their questions.

What the first screen should carry

What the company does, in plain words: garden design, installation and maintenance, or whichever of those it offers.

Where it works, named as towns or neighbourhoods. Landscaping is local, and visitors check that before anything else.

How to reach it: the phone number as text a phone can dial with a tap, and one button for the main next step.

And one reason to believe: a photograph of real work, which this company already had, plus years in business or a short line from a client.

Keeping what people liked

Owners keep splash pages for a reason. The photograph is the best they have, and the page feels calm and expensive.

Both can survive. The photograph can fill much of the first screen of the real home page, with the words and the number set clearly on or beside it.

The calm comes from space and restraint, not from a gate. A first screen with one line, one number and one button is still uncluttered.

What cannot survive is the wait. Anything that must be watched or clicked before the visitor learns what the company does is costing calls.

The counter-case within the site

A large photograph is not the problem. A landscaper sells something people want to see, and an image can reasonably fill most of the first screen.

What matters is that the words, the phone number and the next step share that screen, with no button standing between the visitor and them.

A company with two genuinely different customers, such as homeowners and commercial property managers, can offer two clear routes on the first screen. That belongs on the real home page, not on a gate in front of it.

Keep the photograph if it is good. Remove the splash page, and let the first screen do the work.

What to change

1. Remove the splash page and its animation.
2. Put the real home page at the main address.
3. Redirect the old inner address to it.
4. Say what you do and where in the first line.
5. Put the phone number at the top, as text.
6. Resize the photograph for phones.
7. Rewrite the page title to name services and area.

Step two carries the most weight. The main address is where search engines, the Google listing and every printed card send people, so it has to be the page that answers them.

The same first-screen problem, with a seasonal cause, is covered in the home page still selling Christmas.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.