I see many sites have a quick loading animation, then the site is shown in all its glory with images etc beeing fully loaded. My question is how do I do this, load the full page before anything is shown?
One way would be to show a spinner (e.g. animated gif), then pull in the content via AJAX (injecting it into the DOM after it has been retrieved).
Ponyfoo does this. Is this the kind of effect you mean?
A lot of people treat that as a sort of “go away” message. Most people want to see the page load straight away without anything interfering with the load of the page. Most people have fast enough access to the internet now that if properly written entire pages appear in a second or two. They only take longer when slowed down by effects like that.
Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t work if you have JavaScript disabled.