Alright. To be fair, I'm not sure what kind of script I'm looking for. I'm helping a friend make a website. Unfortunately, I'm only familiar with the basics of HTML. I'm trying to learn more!

What he wants is a setup where he can have an image on the homepage. He wants visitors to click that image to enter the site. However, it's not quite that simple. He wants some sort of animation when people click the image. He'd like it to dissolve or something of that sort before taking visitors to the website.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks for your help!

I would say a javascript would work best.

It would load two images, the stationary image and the animation, and show the stationary image as a link. The link would trigger an onclick action that would change the stationary image with the animation. Also onclick would be a timer for the duration of the animation, after which it would transfer the user to the main page.

For someone who knows javascript well, it shouldn't take long at all to do, you can probably find this in google somewhere. (I don't know javascript, or I would have wrote it)

No way, don't do it. I hate to disrespect other programmers, but NO! Don't use javascript.

Use the one true language which is GOOD AT DISSOLVING stuff and other cool effects, and don't mess with timings and changing pages and images in sync, no no no - risks, bad risks, lots of people will see it out of sync, it will be awful, patchy, amateur.

USE JAVA. Yes, java, not javascript, but java. Go here:

sun.java.com

and have a gander. Look up "java applets" and "dissolve" and other stuff, and just teach yourself enough java to do what you say - it really requires very little java effort to make that happen. Ain't no WAY you should use javascript or anything at all but java for this job. No animated gifs, no flash animations, nothing silly, just use plain old common sense java applets.

Java Applets or DHTML, but I agree JAVA is good, or you can try server side scripting, but I think it will be too much for you too handle for now.

If you must force people to click an image just to get where they wanted to be in the first place then I'd suggest using Flash. It's relatively easy to build in a "delay" on click, in reality the click would simply play a different section of the movie (your dissolve effect) before auto forwarding.

I would go with flash. You can get free templates. Check this out:
http://www.flashfair.com/
Download and edit in Adobe Flash.