Use a landing or intro page
 

Building / having a site for the purpose of just enjoying doing the work, I am NOT the norm in this crowd.

I recently decided to implement an intro or as some call it, a landing page on my site. The reason for doing this was that I have two main sites. One for the vb forums, the other for my ancestry site using the TNG cms. Both under my K4GAP domain. That way I can just direct any potential users/readers to the intro page and they can choose which site they want. Also the intro page is done with pure html and is not very graphically intensive. So it loads really fast.

I've been wondering if it was a good idea to use the intro/landing page so, I've been doing some reading on the pros and cons of such. It seems there are two very diverse opinions on this subject.

What are some of your opinions on this?

I suspect that it will do little harm, but also be of little value. In order for a landing page to be of use, people must land on it. Most people who are new to your site, will get the from a search engine—which are much more likely to index pages deeper in your site. People who are return visitors are very likely to come in from bookmarks to forum home or other internal page—bypassing the landing page.

All true but as I noted, my site is just my hobby and the only folks that know of it are friends and family. Even they won't leave Fakebook long enough to register. So when I do give someone the addy, I just give them the base domain, (k4gap.com) and let them read and choose the site they want to go to.

If it is a hobby and you are happy with it then all good.

My opinion on landing pages and intro pages is that it is never a good idea to put any obstacles in front of your content.

I think that the main goal of using such pages isn't making content obstacles. Both of them are used to convert a visitor into a buyer, but in different ways.