To support what everyone's said, I can tell you from experience, Splash Pages Hurt.

A company I work for -- when I reconstructed their website, I removed the splash page. The page was just an extra click for viewers who want to get to the bottom line quickly.

After removing the splash page, our site's traffic doubled in one month, and # of page views per visit almost tripled. The first impression can gain trust, making viewers (or surfers) feel they won't have to jump through hoops on other pages just to find useful content.