Jun
28
Feng Shui for Your Website?
Filed Under General Stuff
Have you ever wondered why your website just is not doing quite as well as you hoped? Some Indian web designers claim to have the answer, as CNN reports. If you were wondering why it’s so hard to attract a steady flow of visitors and achieve high rankings in the search engines, according to these web designers it could be that your web design elements are simply out of harmony with each other and this is blocking your site’s vital energy flow, resulting in disaster.
Experts say using a combination of astrology and numerology, the ancient sciences will help you choose the right colors, font, placement of graphics and navigation bar to make the perfect Web site.
Can’t decide between Courier or Verdana? The heavens hold the answer.
Now, it is easy to scoff at this new application of the ancient philosophies of vaastu shastra and Chinese feng shui in website design that is being touted by these Indian web design firms. But a very similar case of web designers pushing frivolous web design happens all the time. It generally does more harm than good. And it is called Flash!
Now Flash might look funky, but think of the last time that you sat at your computer, watching a silly bouncing ball or similar device, while waiting for a Flash website to load. What went through your mind as the interminable seconds ticked by and the progress indicator slowly filled up, pixel by pixel? Hated it? I thought so!
The chances are that, unless it happened to be a website that you really had to see, you would have clicked away within five seconds. That’s all most web surfers are ready to wait for a page to load, according to the surveys. And yet, the lure of a ‘modern’ website decked out with fancy Flash gizmos, seems to be too much for many businesses to resist.
They seem to think that having all sorts of animations and effects pop out at you from the screen will somehow make them look more professional and encourage you to do business. What they just don’t realise is that you’re probably not looking at their website at all in the first place. And they also forget that, if you are, the music they choose to blare out through your speakers could simply irritate you, or even wake up the kids.
Some of the more ‘creative’ Flash designs go as far as leaving you to try and figure out which of the tiny dots or squares or whatever you have to click on to activate the section you want to see. Many include the text as part of the flash, so that, if you happen to be using the wrong screen resolution, the writing does not scale well and you simply cannot read the information the website was set up to provide – not to mention that the search engines cannot index Flash-embedded text either.
It just seems like so many websites nowadays are all out begging you to go away. So much for simple, user-friendly web design that works to make your life easier and encourages you to stay on!
It’s not that careful and controlled use of Flash is unjustified, but many web designers continue to push extensive use of Flash as beneficial, and even prestigious – a sort of online status symbol, if you like. Why would they do so in spite of the evidence against this?
Just like Seth Godin says of the Indian ‘web astrologers’, it’s easier than concentrating on effective design that really works. And, in the case of Flash, it’s a great money spinner to boot.
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