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Home » Other Tips » Creating a simple splash page

Creating a Simple Splash Page

One of the problems with an all Flash site is that the web site owner really doesn't have the ability to put much into the site for search engines to chew on.  Many employ a splash page to partially get around this limitation.  While a splash page isn't as good for the search engines as a separate HTML site, it can help.

Below is some very simple HTML to allow you to create a splash page.

 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
body
    {
    /*    Change #ffffff to whatever color you want
        your background color to be.  #ffffff is white    
        */
    background-color:    #ffffff;
    
    /*    Center everything
        */
    text-align: center;
    }
img.mainimage
    {
    /*    Turn off the border that will come up after wrapping the
        image in an <a> tag
        */
    border: 0;
    
    /*    Center the image
        */
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    display: block;
    }
</style>
<title>Your splash page title</title>
<meta name="description" content="A few complete sentences describing your company.">
<meta name="keyword" content="keywords if you want to use them, but most search engines ignore">
</head>
<body>
<a href="/path/to/your/flash/site/"><img class="mainimage" src="/path/to/your/image/"></a>
<p>Some text under your image</p>
</body>
</html>

Customizing it for your site
First thing you'll need to do is create a graphic.  It can be done in whatever program you're comfortable with and then uploaded to your site, but should be no more than about 750 pixels across by 600 pixels tall and should be a JPG.  Upload the image and be sure to remember where you put it, you'll need to know in a couple of steps.

The line "background-color: #ffffff;" allows you to change the background color.  Change #ffffff to whatever hex color you want.

/path/to/your/flash/site/ needs to be replaced with the path to your Flash and /path/to/your/image/ needs to be replaced with where you uploaded your image in the first step. 

The text between <title> and </title> can be changed to whatever you want your page title to be.  The meta tags for description and keywords should also be changed.
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