Conventional Tips : Say No to Splash pages & Flash intro's

Design firms often love to talk their clients into these pages because they get to be creative and charge more.
Creating one of these pages as the entrance way to your site is one of the single worst things you can do. Visitors hate splash pages, because they often take too long to download and they don't provide the visitor with anything. Remember, visitors are there for one reason, to see what you have to offer them and get the information they are seeking. A huge graphic doesn't answer any of their questions, it only delays their search.

A flash intro is much the same, while it will generally download very quickly, it still delays the visitor in finding what he or she is looking for. 
Keep the amount of clicks a visitor must make to get to quality information down to a bare minimum.

With every successive click a visitor must make, there is more of a chance he/she will give up and go somewhere else.

The second reason to stay away from these is that it has a huge affect on search engines. Search engines can only index text, a huge graphic or flash intro doesn't give the engines anything to index. As a result the homepage, which is often the highest ranking page on a site, has almost no chance of ranking well at all. In addition, depending on how the links from the graphic or flash to internal pages are coded, the engines may not be able to follow the links to the rest of the pages on the site which means your site will not get spidered properly.

To summarize, stay away from splash pages and flash intro's. Give the visitor some actual text to read and the engines something to index. Your visitor retention will go up, and so will your search engine traffic.