Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's Vastu
nanopolitan writes "Wired has a story on harmonious website design according to Vastu, 'the Indian counterpart of feng shui'. The graphic accompanying the story has an analysis of Slashdot's design by Dr. Smita Narang. Her verdict? This site is 'in desperate need of balance'." From the article: "Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."
Penn and Teller had a decent show on Feng Shui, and I agree with with their conclusion.
It's all bullshit!
Just like the subject of this news post.
http://www.webvastu.com/
.. I dunno maybe cuz .. CAUSE IT'S AS UGLY AS GORILLA ORANGUTAN BALLS!!
"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
(btw, what's a "restauant"?)
as much as i don't believe in feng shui; some of it does serve a purpose with common sense, in design we do have things called balance and these are represented by different shapes with different weights when they have an equal mass, not only shapes but also colours have the same impact, just draw a neutral Grey box inside a Green square and a neutral Grey box inside a Blue square. but simply standing back and analyzing what isn't right can be done by anyone, but understanding why it isn't right takes practice and education. like take restaurants, you dont want to put a mirror facing the door as people's psychological impression is theres someone there, feng shui attributes this to 'loosing wealth out the door', also say you have a long Bar thats narrow (pub type of bar), you dont want to use patterns that attribute to the fact that its long, you'll want to break up the area with different patterns or furniture.
all these things can be applied to a website, along with page layout can be applied, a really good read of this can be found in "the Zen of CSS design" - this was a very good read for both technical and design principles.
Uh, under preferences.
The link just to the right of the text box that says preferences.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
http://validator.w3.org/check says Result: Failed validation
If you can't get that right you've got no chance.
Common sense is not so common
In web design there are two schools: "The Card Sharks" and "The Holy Scrollers".
Both schools have advantages and disadvantages. The specifics will always be root for discussion between webdesigners.
Relying on someone whose design is somewhat scary and made in glaring colors only (yes, there is an audience for sites like that, no, I don't think tech people would be fond of permanently blazing colors), has no sense of space and prefers to mush things together and applying arbitrary set of rules to all sites no matter what the target audience is. It's like asking Paris Hilton to design work clothes for a fireman.
:) Logo is squished, icons are a bit scary, though been around for so long people are used to them
;) ALWAYS! Because footer needs to be thick. Frankly many pages have no footer at all. Footer and footnotes can't be overloaded as that means "footnote" becomes primary content. These days footers are pretty much reserved for stuff that makes legal department happy. Of course Slashdot has links in the footer too ;)
;) )
Plus, even that short recommendation is full off weirdness.
A) Instability of "horizontal layout" is stupid. Put the pencil down horizontally. Is it unstable? How about standing on it's end?
B) In case of established site URL does not matter, so this point does not apply. If people know that site has interesting stuff on it, they will put a bookmark or remember the address. Easy to type ones are good for radio/tv commercials
C) Yellow? Even CNET toned down their yellow colors lately. Say hello to the world of Taxi Web sites? Green and blue are present as main elements. So... off the point
D) What little graphics there is it's actually not the best feature of the Slashdot
E) I wonder if she never reads anything that is more than 2-3 pages long. Or has that obsessive clicky-clicky-syndrome where person wants, no, needs to click on something NOW! Hence desire to split everything into tiny pages and users that have to use tricks (such as "Print this page") to re-assemble stuff back. Again, technical field pretty much demands more text than, say, some short poems collections
F) About the footer... She has to wear bell-bottoms then
Conclusion: more bullshit than usual, less design and pretty things than one'd think. Slow news day at Wired. Slashdot is not for the customers of Vastu-fied sites (but *gasp!* you already know that
Hyperom.com
Even though some follow these 'rules' religiously now, I think they were primarily established to promote good atmosphere/convenience by the ancient people who set it.
And there are always people who try to make money off it, by scaring people into believing that 'something bad' might happen if it isn't followed. And there are people ready to buy them.
Sent from my desktop computer
The funny thing is that the page has this as DTD:
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//SoftQuad//DTD HoTMetaL PRO 4.0::19971010::extensions to HTML 4.0//EN" "hmpro4.dtd"