Alternative page on first site visit

As an interim step I’ve created a static “Splash” page and made that my home page and a blog page where the posts show up which you can get to through the nav menus.

Now what I think I need is some code to put on the Splash page that says:
1. look for a cookie =”visited”
2. if visited redirect to /blog
3. if no cookie set a cookie= “visited”

any ideas how to do this, php, javascript, ??

I would advise against doing this. Depending on how it’s implemented, some search engines could see this as “cloaking” and penalize or delist you.

It’s also kind of annoying for someone who’s visiting your site. If a user clicks on a link promising “tasty cookie recipes” (or whatever your site is about) and they get your “about” page instead, they’re probably going to bail.

A better idea from a technical and user experience standpoint is something like WP Greet Box. Instead of taking you to a separate “splash” page and making you dig for the content, it displays your welcome messages inline with the content the user was expecting. Everybody wins!

But I can’t get either of the Greet Box plugins to work, I click links on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter to posts on the site and I just see the post, no greeting at all. I’ve just upgraded to WP3.0 so don’t know if that’s causing a problem.

And anyway what I want is to display the message only the first time a visitor comes to the site homepage even directly without going through a referrer site. And never afterwards, I don’t think these plugins can be configured do that.

I agree if the visitor is clicking a link to a particular post they should go to the post without a detour. But I think that would be the case if the “home page” is set as a static page and the cookie setting is only done and evaluated on that page. The about message only displays once and only if someone is going to the root URL.