Landing page

Not sure if this is the best area to post this, but as it's to do with my planning of the site, I will!

My client wants a landing page that will effectively sit in front of the homepage. The purpose of the page will be firstly to warn people that the content of the website is slightly adult in nature, secondly to promote the special membership joining offer, thirdly to entice them to sign up for the free newsletter and finally a small 5 question survey. There will be a button on there for people to just skip it and go straight to the site, so nobody will be forced to sign up for anything before proceeding, but, the questions I have are:

1) Should this landing page be the index.htm page, or should this be called something else and the main site homepage is index.htm?

2) What can I do to try and get search engines to direct to this landing page rather than going to the main site homepage? There is no login required to access the main site homepage, so anyone with the url for it could go there, but we want to TRY and get new visitors to go to the landing page first, we also want people who have signed up for membership to be able to go straight to the main homepage and not have to go via the landing page because that would be irritating for them!

Any pointers much appreciated, thanks

Hi Vanessa,
I can answer the first part of your question.
Yes the Landing page should be index.html or index.htm

Google will find it but it will need content for it to rank well. (hence the reason most people don't do it)

On the second part, about having members not have to go through the landing page, I really don't know anything about that. Maybe a javascript that would remember them or if they have cookies enabled they could by pass it. Blah.. no idea there..

For the robots to link to that page i think it's:
<meta name="Robots" content="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">
Sorry if that's not what you wanted!

What about the other pages on the site, Alex? Do the search engines not want to see them?

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Sorry I thought you meant by this that you wanted search engines to only display the one page.

Thanks Linda for answering the first part.

Alex/Marc - Thank you, yes I was wondering about whether I should put the robots no-follow thingy on all the other pages except the landing page, but I'm sure spinal had said somewhere that it's not the best way of doing things and it's no guarantee that the search engines won't index it. Also, I'm not sure it would make the site be seen favourably by search engines?

Yes for popularity, that would be it would only index one page..
though you could put it to use by putting all your keywords there etc I guess.
How about you give the user a session called guest on the splash page, and then on all the other pages if they don't have the session re-direct them to the splash page?

Yeah, I would also do it with PHP sessions.

codepunk agrees!
now you have to do it

Only trouble is, I don't know how

Vanessa, this may help: http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_sessions.asp.

Good luck!

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Thank you Guess I'd better get learning...

I understand that you have good reasons for using a landing page but I still think it's a bad idea. Surely you can advertise all of those things on the home page? I'd rethink this. People want content not offers or warnings. Think about the user, a real one. A lawyer with a young child, looking for a product or a service, doesn't have time to read through your maarketing blurb or listen to your warnings. People want content, you can advertise to them as they go, entice them using the quality of the actual site and the products/services it offers.

I suppose if the client has asked for it specifically then there's not much you can do about it but I try to convince them otherwise.

But yeah, it would be the index page and sessions would be perfect to by-pass it for already registered users or whatever.

Pete.

But if the content is adult related (convinced you making a porn site ha)
Then there would "need" to be a for warning,
I personally don't mind a splash screen, personal preference i guess

I didn't take "slightly adult in nature" to mean hardcore porn but I maybe I just don't understand what 'adult in nature' means and have lost touch.

I've had an idea though. Why not have your index.html as the standard home page that members would see and have another page called landing.html or something and using some clever jiggery pokery you could detect whether it was an already registered user or a new (or at least not registered) user. Then you would leave registered users where they were and redirect new user to the landing page.

I'm still against landing pages but this may be a good alternative and at least your index.html is the real index page this way.

Pete.

EDIT: A good reason I've just thought of is that you don't want some landing page having great PR and the other more content rich pages being rubbish, do you?

Yes, I hear what you're saying Pete. Like Alex says, with the content being adult, there's a need for warning first. Although as we all know, a lot of adult sites don't bother with any warning, but he wanted to seem a bit more responsible than most. So I suppose a way round that would be to just have no unsuitable images on the homepage, so then there could be a kind of warning within the homepage about going further into the site, but it would still be a proper homepage with all the navigation and everything right there.

Pete - didn't see your second post there before I posted my reply. Yes, that sounds like a better way round it maybe.

Just to clarify (without going into too much detail!), definitely not hardcore porn, let's just say artistic.

You could use JavaScript to give the warning. Before the home page is loaded you could clear the screen or black it out and then have a 'Site contains content of an adult nature' warning. Then upon clicking 'Continue' it would show the page. Clicking leave would send the user to google.com or whatever.

The problem is that if the site is a bit adult then most people who are visiting it will be expecting that and ideally you should be hammering them visually. Sex sells and when that is specifically what they have come to buy, it would be silly to not give it to them immediately. This is a tough one, if this guy's morals mean more to him than his profit then all credit too him but realistically you need that sort of imagery from the word go.

It's a tough one and I don't really think there is much place for morality in a situation like this. Do what you can to make sure minors can't view the site but make the most of what is on offer (sex). Make sure the site is signed up to these child protection programs too (the ones that block registered sites automatically for parents who subscribe, I'm sure you've heard of them).

Pete.

You say artistic, does that mean this is the classy end rather than the sleazy side of things (though I would question the fact that there is any such divide)?

If so then some of my previous comment aren't quite so relevant.

Pete.