Slashdot Mirror

Reminds me of Web Vastu

This site is nothing appealling - http://www.webvastu.com/. Brown and yellow is ugly and the gradient shading makes it feels tacky.

I don't know if she designed this website, but if that's her vision of perfect design, God help us all. http://www.webvastu.com/

this website designer needs some serious help

No kidding! This is the website of "one of India's hottest Web designers"? Forget the coding, the cheesy colors and awkward layout are all you need to condemn it. Is there something in Webvastu that forbids adequate left and right margins for text? And this section on the home page made me laugh:

How to Order?

Click here to know how you can order this book.

...read

OK, maybe it's not fair to make fun of their English ability, but purely in terms of Web usability, it's really odd to have the headline be a question and a link, then have a superfluous "Click here" sentence that doesn't have a link (not that I'm advocating "Click here" links), then a "...read" that has another link to the same order page. Plus, there's a seemingly-out-of-place "Buy this book" link at the top of the page. And the book cover doesn't link to the About the Book page or the order page.

And that's just a two minute review of the home page. Frankly, the design of Slashdot is better (and even better balanced) than her personal site.

A) agree.

B) I disagree -- a site with an URL of "http://www.ibm.com/developer" is much more appealing to me at a deep level than "http://www.ibm.com/checkurl?id=sdafwerud23432&sit eid=ibm&location=canada&user=12315asdfasdggfdjsdfg &destination=developer"

C) Yellow sucks -- its the most apparent colour to the human eye, so use it sparingly or appropriately. Her own website gave me a headache looking at the title bar.

D) Graphically, depends on your audience. I think Slashdot could use a little spice in the background graphics and such (not where the text is, but in between). Several good CSS demos (CSS Zen garden for example) show how to do this tastefully.

E) Scrolling sucks, but its necessary. Do your users prefer scrolling or clicking? Do whichever makes them happier. Offer a copy of each and see which one people use more. Try iframes and such, etc.

F) Footers get ignored by most people, period.

Forking takes technical skills. Accordingly, her website states that she is a "prominent author for many websites", and yet the same page carries the notice "Site Developed by IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd.". Why did she even get the attention of an article?

Too bad her website is so fugly... http://www.webvastu.com/index.html

I used to think myspace looked like shit, until I took a look at this.

SEO is a bunch of superstitious witchcraft anyways, so who knows? Perhaps Google is a fan of elementally balanced web pages.

Of course, I would like to see some numbers before I go re-working all the "Paanchbhootas" of my site...

...using Google, and the best I could come up with is this. It's an absolutely ugly reddish, brownish, yellowish turd of a web site. Is that the ideal we are supposed to be striving for? Does anybody see the irony in trying to hawk a book about web design using an ugly website?

Checkout The press section of that webvastu site; and be knocked out with 3 or more movies/sounds playing alltogether at once ...

It drives me nuts... For so far balance to the mind ;)

It lets too many marketing scams on its front page. I mean, why would Slashdot be offended by someone insults their design, and yet designs sites like this one.

This 1995 style homepage with terrible code in desparate need of a complete rewrite.

Yet, she/he (?) just said "Slashdot is out of balance" and you fall for it. I wouldn't post this obvious-things-your-already-know post, if it wasn't happening all the time.

Just few days ago we have a book review article here, of someone who believes good web design involves huge paragraphs of page text rendered as a huge tall GIF image.

I think those rascals over at wired.com got her to review it for us (notice they didn't want her opinion on their own site!). As for the perfect Vastu site, I would guess something like this.

ANYONE who does web coding should see right through this bullshit - a simple examination of the jokers website http://www.webvastu.com/ Should send up warning signs to ANY but the greenest of nubes. The 'three piece' image (WHY the hell do people do this?!?) isn't compatable with Opera or Safari... the three 'section boxes' to the right of the image have some of the ugliest formatting I've seen (It's called side padding - use it! At the same time cut back on the top/bottom, that looks like crap)... The site renders as a crappy little stripe justified left (Much like wired, it's not bad enough having a shitbox amatuer fixed width layout, but for crying out loud center the damned thing)... fixed px sized fonts that are too small to be useful to 'large font' users... (anything LESS than 12px needs a brick upside the head, and I'm hesitant to go below 'EGA fonts' - 14px) and the validator chokes on the doctype... Seriously whiskey tango foxtrot is this nonsense: Wow, I wish I'd thought of finding some whack-job eastern art form to use as justification for a lack of knowing how to design a website... My BULLSHIT alarm hasn't gone off this hardcore since I first heard of "Web 2.0" ... and much like Web 2.0, Penn and Teller could easily devote 30 minutes to this one.

http://www.webvastu.com/

I wish I hadn't clicked on that link.

The goggles... they do NOTHING!

http://www.webvastu.com/ - the page is horrendous, I certainly hope people don't adapt her style too much!

Check out the official website. Wonderful isn't it?

Last time I saw so much orange was when the dutch fans swarmed into a german airport during Germany 2006. Also, one piece of advice from a friend:
Don't overlay solid red divisions on top of gradient orange/yellow backgrounds, and when you want to do gradients don't do it like this.

It looks totally uncool.

Check out the official website. Wonderful isn't it?

Last time I saw so much orange was when the dutch fans swarmed into a german airport during Germany 2006. Also, one piece of advice from a friend:
Don't overlay solid red divisions on top of gradient orange/yellow backgrounds, and when you want to do gradients don't do it like this.

It looks totally uncool.

What a load of bollocks. What follows next is the sales pitch to glue some special crystals into the web server to help it reverberate with only good juju, like a cosmic drum ... or whatever.

These are pretty tall words coming from someone with such a shitty website, too; http://www.webvastu.com/ needs more gradients, larger leading, more fonts, narrower columns, and definitely more orange. Especially the orange. For a special treat, disable style sheets: accessibility++. I would make some statement about karma here but (A) I don't know the Indian-equivalent term, and (B) I'm assuming Dr. Smita is in fact already completely blind.

Is it wrong of me to also be cynical that the good doctor can't even spell their own gimmicky 15-seconds-of-fame loanword, "Vastu", consistently on their own website? No, go back to smoking your hookah, doc. Your website is awesome, dude--it's everyone else that's got it wrong.

/. should look more like this!

http://www.webvastu.com/index.html

GGAAHH, that site is far from perfect.

Press Section: multiple videos autoplay, forcing you to either mute you speakers or rapidly click all the pause buttons.

The three boxes ("About the book", "What is...", and "How to order") don't have enough black border around them. But more importantly, they look very similar to Google AdSense ads, and the positioning on certain pages makes this illusion worse. So you eye ends up automatically tuning out the most important content.

The red background is at least minimally functional (kudos for getting yellow text to be readable on a bright red background), but gaaah, I think I'm getting a sunburn from it.

Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.

I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.

Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.

I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.

Some links to sites she's designed according to these principles would be useful. This is apparently the website of the book: http://www.webvastu.com/ and it more or less exactly fails to please the eye.

Erk, has anyone taken a look at Dr. Narang's website, The fusion of two sciences, Web Vastu?

http://www.webvastu.com/

"When houses, restauants, shops, shopping centers can be made according to the ancient science of Vastu Shastra then why cann't the Websites also follow the same rules"

-Dr. Smita Jain Narang

Gee .. I dunno maybe cuz .. CAUSE IT'S AS UGLY AS GORILLA ORANGUTAN BALLS!!

(btw, what's a "restauant"?)