I read a bunch of books about “Feng Shui,” and I moved some furniture around, plus I painted a wall, and I still didn’t notice a big change. For a while, I ran around with a Feng Shui consultant, but that got a little weird, as this one person would apply the implied concepts to everything and I mean everything. I remember watching her scratch out a diagram to help design a better business card. Which got me thinking about applying these principles to web page layout.
The challenge is, though, how to incorporate everything, plus make sure that the material is compliant across a half-dozen browser platforms. I think one of the most telling demonstrations I’ve ever seen, courtesy of last year’s SXSW workshops, was watching a panel lead grab a web page and then resize it on the screen, seeing how fluid the page was. What was funny, to me, that particular panel person, 1) won an award for design, and 2), her page wasn’t dynamic. However, to her credit, I use the same elements she used in her award-winning layout, basically a long column of text. Problem being, with a horoscope, the trend is to carve everything into a block for each sign and that generates 12 times as much work.
Around here, we want life to be simple, not complicated. It’s the simple things in life. My wallet’s a little sparse these days, so for an afternoon break, I did another 7 miles on the trail, stopped off at a pool on the way, grabbed a hot link at the convenience store and a big coke, and called it a day. It’s the simple pleasures that are important.
Cruising around on the web, I’ve noticed a lot of Flash splash screens, and on most of these screens, there’s a little button that says, “skip intro.” I wonder, is that a hint? Not many folks want to waste time looking at Flash animation for an introduction. “Just give me the data I seek!” is the familiar cry, I would guess.
But how does this wrap into Feng Shui? I haven’t got that figured out yet. I look at the diagrams, I line things up with the diagram.
Plus: remember that a huge percentage of the folks hitting my site are still using Netscape 4.7x. That’s bad, very bad. That version of Netscape is over 5 years old. Then there’s also a smaller percentage coming in under that at version three, or worse, WebTV. WebTV has an incredibly small screen, and trying to get everything in on that size of a square is pretty hard.
I made some peace with myself, stuck with a fairly standard layout, and although it’s not the coolest, nor the slickest, it works across what I figure must be the median average.
I figure the hardest part of trying to apply Feng Shui principles in web page design comes back to the point where the entrance must be, that’s the center of the design. Where’s the front door on a web page?
Maybe I should scrap it all, and just go back to plain text. But that brings us right back to the problem of text size. All I wanted to do was make sure that my site’s format followed ancient and practical wisdom for working correctly in a modern world. Sort of like astrology.
