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Slashdot's Vastu
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Oct 28, 2006 02:42 AM
from the we-go-vertical dept.
from the we-go-vertical dept.
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."
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Shouldn't there be a foot icon? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Standards! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not kidding.
Re:Standards! (Score:5, Funny)
I know "this thread is useless without pics" is a Slashdot faux pas, but calling this chick a dude is pretty harsh.
Parent
We don' need no steenking standards... (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, HTML IS a programming language: it is one of the semantic mark-up languages of the SGML family [wikipedia.org], designed for computerized implementation. I think what you meant is that HTML is not an imperative language [wikipedia.org] like Fortran, Cobol, ..., Perl, or Python. HTML is instead a declarative language [wikipedia.org], like most other markup languages, or the regex language em
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Less prone? It's an error itself! It's equivalent to this code:
If you use a slash in an attribute value, that value must be quoted. It's fallout from the SHORTTAG NET that lets you specify attribu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time you wrote a parser? Regex engine? Context free grammar?
These things exist for a reason. English is hard to process in a computer because it's contextual. Would you argue that removing spacing from English is ok because many ideogram-based languages depend on context to tell you what the correct spacing of a sentence is?
What is the proper segmentation of "theyouthevent" ? They you the vent? The youth event? T
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And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Only people with double-digit IQ or a severe case of money poisoning actually listen to these jackasses.
Re: (Score:2)
Me an' me bro...uh...Cletus went thar' an' won that thar' lottury.
Momma, she says, "Boys, you best git on' them thar' web saytes up an' stuff."
So, I'd a' like to...uh...su..sub..subsc...git that thar' newslittur your have.
Feng Shui is correct (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Feng Shui is correct (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute.
"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."
Yeah. And my cash-mishandling invisible man in the sky who is going to sentence me to eternity of fire and brimstone and suffering...but loves me can beat up yours too!
The problem is, I DO understand it. This is why I call it like I see it. Bullshit. First to last.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's you who doesn't understand "basic scientific principles". The 1st sentence you posted is, well, wrong. It's a well-known fallacy. You can conclude many true things based on the fact that the sky is red. All you need is a consistent set of "rules" for such deductions to be made.
If you a
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Page length (Score:5, Insightful)
People who advocate short page lengths probably don't use the web for information.
And yes I think google should default to 100 results
Re:Page length (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta agree with that. People who want multiple pages are usually trying to pump ad views. This chick just seems to want to make things pretty, or her version of pretty anyway. I guess if you can spout BS well enough to sound knowledgeable, people will throw money at you. Serves no useful purpose to anyone else, but must be nice.
Parent
Re:Page length (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Both schools have advantages and disadvantages. The specifics will always be root for discussion between webdesigners.
preferences on google search results (Score:4, Informative)
The link just to the right of the text box that says preferences.
Parent
Penn and Teller (Score:5, Informative)
It's all bullshit!
Just like the subject of this news post.
Re:Penn and Teller (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
I've known for a long time.... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows (Score:5, Funny)
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.
You made a funney. (Score:2)
Thanks a fucking lot, my 2-month-old kid was finally falling asleep now that it's nearly five in the morning, and then you had to go and write what you did.
I suggest submitting the name change recommendation to Microsoft along with a suggestion that the default skin should paint everything with orange gradients.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force (Score:3, Funny)
Her website is damn UGLY!! (Score:5, Informative)
"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"?)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Her website is damn UGLY!! (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I hadn't clicked on that link.
The goggles... they do NOTHING!
Parent
Bunch of horse hooey (Score:2)
The page should have less articles so it's "proportionate"? What do they think it is, a book?
People in glass houses... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
LAFF at "The fusion of two sciences" bit on there.
Re: (Score:2)
GGAAHH, that site is far from perfect.
Press Section [webvastu.com]: 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 leas
Re:People in glass houses... (Score:4, Funny)
*Shivers* So.. cold..
Parent
Design of the Book's site (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/ [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 [webvastu.com]) 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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//SoftQuad//DTD HoTMetaL PRO 4.0::19971010::extensions to HTML 4.0//EN" "hmpro4.dtd"
Look how harmonious Webvastu is ! (Score:3, Funny)
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!
Good Water flow (Score:2)
So will several cups of tea or several glasses of beer.
(As for "...Rob Malda chose an excellent URL, even though it's confusing when read aloud", one wonders why the good doctor thinks the domain name was chosen in the first place.)
What I really want to know is what Web Vastu says about loading up your page with stupid Flash animations so that when you go to a new page, the page slowly drops down or slides in or rolls down, or the letters fly into p
Says it all really (Score:4, Informative)
If you can't get that right you've got no chance.
Hilarious. (Score:2)
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/ [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
So in case you were wondering... (Score:2)
What can hurt business is a technical site that is (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Slashdot was just redesigned (Score:2)
Um, the current slashdot site is a redesign from earlier this year. Did you miss all the posts from CmdrTaco evaluating the various design submissions?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Dr. Narang, meet Dr. Dre (Score:2)
I said "Hell no bitch, you'd have a dick in your mouth! mouth! mouth!"
Re: (Score:2)
That depends on the American you're talking to; there are probably plenty of them who'd lap it up if you gave them some Biblical quote that one could, if one worked really hard at it, interpret in some way that one could, if one really wanted to, think referred to some Web design is
Re:You understand not the truth. Let me guide you. (Score:2)