A new category for a new teaching toy – er, I mean tool: Bad Church Web Design Posters. Today’s entry:

“Christian Bling” – or – “Nothing says ‘welcome to our church’ like a ‘pimped-up’ splash page.”

Click on the small image to see the big image.

With this poster’s release, don’t let me catch any of you with rhinestone crosses spinning on a splash page – then again, if you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that you shouldn’t even have a splash page, or as Vincent Flanders aptly put it in a January 2001 ibizInterview:

Wal-Mart doesn’t block the entrance to its stores by making you watch a movie or make you listen to someone who explains the history of the company. That’s what a splash page does. It blocks your visitor from getting to the meat of your site. Also, certain search engines give a higher ranking to the contents of your root page (where the splash page is located) and splash pages rarely have any information. A splash page can hurt your rankings with a search engine.

Oh, and please, no hot-linking w/out providing a link back here (to the article, not just the picture :-).