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."

Comments

Standards!

[headkase]

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.

Re:Standards!

[cptgrudge]

I know "this thread is useless without pics" is a Slashdot faux pas, but calling this chick a dude is pretty harsh.

And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!

[Chas]

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.

Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!

[deathshadow60]

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.

Page length

[Anonymous Coward]

Wtf .. she called it a negative .. I like a long page length .. seriously who the heck wants to click through multiple pages??

People who advocate short page lengths probably don't use the web for information.

And yes I think google should default to 100 results .. why not?

Penn and Teller

[Konster]

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.

Re:Penn and Teller

[Anonymous Coward]

Being something of a sinophile, and the owner of a modest library on feng shui, let me digest what it really says.

Don't live so close to water that it washes your house away. Don't live so far away from water that it's an inordinate pain in the ass to get. Don't live close to the edges of cliffs which might collapse, or which you might fall off of. Do live in a location where your dwelling has as much protection from the elements as possible. But putting it directly in the path of the tree that looks kind of rotted and is about to fall it probably a bad idea too. Don't shit where you eat or are likely to drink. The sun is bright and hot, avoid suffering it unnecessarily. But the sun is also helpful, make sure you've got enough of it.

All it is are a set of building codes set to a spiritual narrative that's supposed to make it easy to remember. A smart person with good aesthetic sensibilities is required to make it work. Well compensated professionals in Asia, they get paid because they have some measure of the later, and more than some skill blending Confusian sensibilities with modern needs and tastes. The people on Bullshit! that's not what they're doing. They're banking on the ignorance of others.

The real tenents, with the mysticism striped away, they make a lot of sense to me. Except for the living underneath a rotting tree thing. Look, you buy the home you can afford.

I've known for a long time....

[The Famous Druid]

... that the average /. poster is 'unbalanced'.

Windows

[Konster]

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.

Her website is damn UGLY!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?)

Re:Her website is damn UGLY!!

[_Hellfire_]

http://www.webvastu.com/

I wish I hadn't clicked on that link.

The goggles... they do NOTHING!

Design of the Book's site

[Demiansmark]

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.

Feng Shui is correct

[macadamia_harold]

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.

What can hurt business is a technical site that is

[saikou]

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.
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 :) Logo is squished, icons are a bit scary, though been around for so long people are used to them

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 ;) 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 ;)

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 ;) )