I managed to put together .htaccess like this and it is working fine
RewriteRule ^$ /splash [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.examle.com/$1 [R=301,QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)?$ /index.php?cat=$1 [L]
This redirects things like example.com/one to http://www.example.com/index.php?cat=one
However, I would like to add more functionality for my current project so that multiple variables get parsed. So for example:
example.com/category-one?another_variable=some_data&even_more=more_data, etc...
get parsed to
http://www.example.com/index.php?cat=category-one&another_variable=some_data&even_more=more_data
Also, is solution like this seo-friendly?