Slow Fade out a cover page into the home page?

I'm working on a site not yet live and trying to have the cover page transition after 5 seconds into the homepage in a creative way.

I'm using the following to provide the transition:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url= my client's website URL " />

This works great but the transition is abrupt. I'd like to offer maybe a fade or other creative transition into the homepage. I would love suggestions of how to do this. Thank you.

Can you share site url? You can setup password & share url.