# t-shirt hell set up



## punkapalooza (Oct 18, 2006)

is it better to have a front page like t-shirt hell does with all the words on it that to just have a 'home' page as the starting point? will i be seen more online and in search engines?


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## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

No, it's much worse for human visitors, and now that search bots have got more sophisticated it may be picked up by them as keyword spamming.

We've wondered before actually why T-shirt Hell do that (did you ever get an answer Rodney?), because it seems kind of... antiquated.


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

It's garbage. Really ticks me off that they have such a blatent crappy gateway page and still rank first for "t-shirt" honestly  Despite their high rankings, I don't think T-shirt Hell is a very good website to base yours on, as the design (more than just the gateway page) is pretty mediocre.

Even if it's still helping them, expect that trend to stop sooner rather than later; search engines are getting better at spotting junk pages designed for the search engines instead of the actual users, and they WILL be counting you down for them.


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## jdr8271 (Jun 16, 2005)

Them ranking first, and their splash page are not coorelated at all. 
They rank first becuase of the thousands of pages that link to them.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> s it better to have a front page like t-shirt hell does with all the words on it that to just have a 'home' page as the starting point?


It's better to get straight to the t-shirt listings and forget the splash page.

As jdr said:



> Them ranking first, and their splash page are not coorelated at all.


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## Blacksheep 78 (Oct 27, 2006)

Rodney said:


> It's better to get straight to the t-shirt listings and forget the splash page.


I agree, there is no need to have a splash page, but dont confuse that with a home page.

This is something I thought long and hard about while designing my site. I have a homepage which I decided to do for a few reasons... 

One, I can offer specials and callout specific shirts I want to draw attention to on my homepage. 

Two, I can offer news/info on the homepage. With this I can avoid having a lot of different pages on my site. My customers can easily see any contests, new info, sales, press.. whatever.

Three, I offer two different styles of tees on my site that are contained in two different sections. I want the customer to be able to make the decision for themselves as to what they would like to browse.

Four, If someone likes my shirts and is not keen on the homepage, they can always just bookmark my site on the shirt page. I do this all the time when sites have home and or landing pages. Not to say that everyone will do that, but it makes sense.

If you dont have a reason for a home/landing page, then dont have one. If you have a valid reason try it out and gauge the response.

-Tim


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

Sure, everyone will do their website a bit differently - as it should be. The problem lies when someone creates a page that has no content (or nearly no content) - such as t-shirt hell's gateway page or flash intro pages. These sorts of things offer nothing to the visitor at all in most cases.


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## Blacksheep 78 (Oct 27, 2006)

Yessir, agreed.


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