A wise search engine once told me its all in the first 2 clicks when it comes to success, the design of a website can have a real effect on a websites success because within those 2 clicks a user sees the style of your website and the ease of access to information based on your website, its why when you go to
Rampant Designs,
Baby Seal Productions or
Stick Guy Comics that the layout/style is continuous and from click one you get an idea of what the sites like (all be it for Stick Guy you get a disclaimer). Even the blogs are set out this way you go to the blog and you get the latest posts plus easy navigation. It brings me to something I have always seen as a hits killer and that is splash screens, theres no point to them and they give the visitor no idea of your websites style and I think they break that golden rule of not owning a forum driven website where your forum gets all the attention and your website gradually fades away and the reason for that is most splash screens give you the option of viewing the website or entering the forum, now I think that most visitors who go to the sites url say domain.com want to view domain.com if they wanted to see the forum they would go to domain.com/forum or for those who want to view the forum they can easily select the forum from the navigation.
When I see a splash screen it puts me off the website for the simple reason I am there, they have got my attention using whichever method and now I want to see what the sites about so why do they keep hyping it when they could put the efforts into making me want to return again, also no matter how big your forum is and how popular it is theres hundreds of thousands of forums on the web and its alot more difficult to show how unique you are using the same software as thousands of others while with a website thats something you have thought up, designed and coded its a reflection of you and alot more unique.
My advice when it comes to websites is you should try and be unique, don't go searching on google for inspiration when Soulz designed
Baby Seal Productions he just designed what he wanted it to look like, when I designed
Rampant Designs I just sorted out the sizes then looked at the color scheme and
Stick Guy Comics I decided simplicity was the best option. The point is those layouts are unique, they arent some immitation of a bigger website or something we found on google and I personally believe that helps websites success because its something new to the user not the same thing they see on other sites.
