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."
If he encourages the use of the blink tag I vote we brand him a heretic and burn him at the stake.
I'm not kidding.
Shh.
Seriously, all crap like this is, is a way to justify stupid expenditures based on some self-riteous asshole's personal opinions.
Only people with double-digit IQ or a severe case of money poisoning actually listen to these jackasses.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wtf .. she called it a negative .. I like a long page length .. seriously who the heck wants to click through multiple pages??
.. why not?
People who advocate short page lengths probably don't use the web for information.
And yes I think google should default to 100 results
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.
... that the average /. poster is 'unbalanced'.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Windows Vastu.
It's clear that Microsoft's GUI designers have been smoking some pretty serious weed and studying arcane bullshit notions and ologies of myth when you use Vista or IE7.
Of course Slashdot's Vistu is bad...The site is full of the Dark Spirits of No-life Geeks and Noob-bashers. ;)
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"?)
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.
http://www.webvastu.com/
Yes, it's a picture of beauty which adapts web standards from, er, well from a few years back really.
The site looks like a large blob of curry stains, but boy, is it ever harmonious, with the use of white text on a curry brown background !
Note how the footer is in black italic text and how the whole construct is cunningly created in tables!
Note the subtle use of a ruddy great drop shadow on the logo!
Hear the stunning web page background music when you visit the news page - that sounds like it's playing out of a toilet after a heavy nights drinking in a curry den.
Yes, folks, it's a far better layout than Slashdot, indeed.
After all, who needs good design when you've got Webvastu !
It's harmonious darnit, because we all love muddy brown websites!
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
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.
*Shivers* So.. cold..
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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
Sure, but the basic site structure hasnt changed. It got prettier bars, some new cosmetics, a much needed update on various usability features and hopefully a new, working, css based threshold system soon. It looks a bit sleeker and less 90s, but /.s "look" hasnt really changed.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!
While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is. Those same principles may or may not be applicable with regards to web design, but don't discount entirely that which you clearly do not understand.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
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
I thought it was obnoxious and just goes to further the promotion of bullshit pseudoscience. You know, vastu shastra, like feng shui, is really nothing more than prescientific observations on how to situate a building so it doesn't get flooded, have dirt blown in by prevailing winds, etc (hence the 'feng' and 'shui' in feng shui). It makes this article all the more comical. Thankfully, everyone knows it's bullshit, so no one's listening to this jerk, right? ...Right? RIGHT?
A lot of /. readers are full of hot air, so I think Smita is right in saying that there is "too much air flow" in /.
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
Even worse than being ugly, the page uses fixed-width tables for layout:
She shouldn't be writing books on web design; she needs to read quite a few of them first.
This phrase summarizes the only real redeaming quality of "sciences" like Feng Shui.
The truth is, there is no "science" behind these collective wisdoms. But that doesn't mean all of the conclusions derived are by definition wrong. Unscientific and wrong are not the same thing.
Once upon a time, collective wisdom (in some areas of human civilization) stated that the sun rose every day, carried on the chariot of a God. One could argue that this perception derived from the collective experience of a shared physical observation, the human desire to understand that experience, and the state of human understanding of the world at the time. Many religious beliefs could be seen to have possibly been derived this way.
Now, a citizen could use that understanding to predict the sun would rise the next day (cloud cover aside). Very unscientific, as the belief Helios was at work was based on very unprovable assumptions. But the prediction could hardly be called wrong.
Collective wisdom can provide valuable information, even if the method it is arrived at is little more tha trial and error with a folk explanation on top of it. The folk explanation could be seen as being a handed down tag-on from a "knowledgible leader" ages back who capatilized on mankind's need to understand as a means of self promotion.
Did you use feng shui to determine the aesthetics of your post's punctuation?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Irrespective of the gender confusion of parent, or the relative merits of using Vastu Shasta in preference to Feng Shui or one of the western astrological website balancing methods, this website designer needs some serious help:
A website designer needs to be held to a very high standard of compliance. This website designer fails it.
This post deserves to be modded as very, very funny...
Well, there's this thing that most nerds are really bad at. Even - perhaps especially - when they think they're being good at it (e.g., "skins".) It's called aesthetics.
Feng shui and vastu and the like are, at least partially, non-western models for something that could generally be called aesthetic experience. There are also western models for aesthetics. One could even concieve of usability research as a kind of scientification of a subset of aesthetics.