But I like the design.
Are you talking about a bookmark repository (ok, "homepage") that somehow tells you when there is new stuff on your bookmark?
If that is the case, shouldn't you put a sample image on this screen that shows how the homepage looks like, including the one that tells you a site has been updated?
Ok, but your questions was about a splash screen :-) ... It looks good, but don;t call it a splashscreen. The word brings up awful memories of sites that forced you to wait a minute or two over dial-up just to display some image that told you nothing except to click to get to where you really wanted to go. Your screen has a lot more than that, it is actually useful.
As far as homepages that look very different than the rest of the site, this is a good thing. Lots of entertainment-related sites use them, and they are overall a good thing. The homepage engages the visitor, makes a good impression, and the rest of the site is actually the useful part. Yours is pretty good, it's just the wording I had an issue with.
It auto discovers the RSS feed and periodically checks them, but we never refer to it as "RSS feeds" on the site. We tried to abstract that process as much as possible, so it becomes like any other toggle button.
That's exactly what we were going for, to hook them and pull them to step two (which will hopefully pull them to step three, and so on). Now that we have the format, we plan on continuing to tweak the copy until we find something that works.
Huh? Totes? What? I guess I'm just not cool enough for this site.
We pushed it live just earlier today, so I don't have much data to share with you quite yet, but I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think about splash pages. Particularly ones that have a style that's different from the rest of the site. Have you seen any changes in your number of signups? Did you attract a different sort of user that wouldn't normally sign up?
Also love the Totes quote .. what the?