Sorry, I was so transported by my hate for these splash pages that I forgot to continue.
There may happen that your site is visited in a long sequence. It depends on the product of course. For example, if you sell kitchen furniture, visitors will certainly not stop at the first site but are likely to go on visiting deep in the search engine list to see what's available.
In these cases, I presume that the visitor will write down a site name that looks interesting in order to go back. This happened to me last week and it was a really terrible afternoon. I was looking for a new kitchen and visited all the sites of Italian kitchen furniture producers that attended the recent Furniture exhibition in Milan.
Well, all of them, without exception started with a splash page where their logo or other geometrical figures danced gracefully while a small loading dot dot dot tried to keep me quiet for they were doing something in order to let me in. Some even had a second splash page announcing: Kitchen furniture (flash again), or Choose your language. When I was finally ushered into the place I had a choice between Our Philosophy, Contacts, News and Products but I was already angry. Why do they think I came to visit their site in the first place? I wanted to see their products. Immediately.
What I means is this: if your site is likely to be visited inside a long sequence of sites, study what the others are doing and try to be a little original, and above all, try to put yourself in the visitor's shoes. Even if the furniture was really gorgeous, I gave up. There wasn't one that I could remember.

Valeria

__________________
Web Design and Translation