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Feng shui creates better websites

chinese dragon

Practitioners of feng shui say it can improve your living and working environmment. But does it also work for web pages? (Image: iStockphoto)

Chinese feng shui and the ancient Indian science of vaastu shastra can boost business by helping web designers create better pages, say experts who are marrying traditional philosophies with the internet.

Believers in vaastu shastra say the system seeks to create harmony between people, objects and the five elements of earth, fire, water, air and space.

They say it can be directly applied to the web, just as it is to home design.

The philosophy of feng shui has also been used for centuries to bring balance and harmony between people and their environment.

"Just as the world comprises of the five basic elements, each web site has five elements and these need to be in balance with one another," says Dr Smita Narang, author of Web Vaastu .

The book has proved popular with businesses.

How it works

"Earth is the layout, fire is the colour, air is the HTML, space is name of the web site, and water is the font and graphics," says Narang.

He says each must be chosen carefully to strike a balance with the other.

Narang, a vaastu expert who has spent four years analysing around 500 sites, says a web site that disregards vaastu rules will have few hits and business will suffer.

An essential element of feng shui is the idea that unnecessary objects allow free flow of energy, followers say.

They say this principle can also be applied to making better websites and generating more visits.

A Web site where the colours hurt your eyes, the music offends your ears or has too much information is probably too cluttered and does not give a positive flow of ch'i," says Vikram Narayan, a Mumbai-based feng shui practitioner.

The trick, Narayan says, is to remove items on your web site that serve no purpose, and keep the things that serve you well.

Brijesh Agarwal of Indiamart, a company offering business solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises, says he has had mixed results on the five sites that his company has designed according to vaastu principles.

"We have found that on three sites the number of hits has increased by 60 % but the other two sites have not been affected," Agarwal says.

"I can't say for definite that the positive results are due to vaastu or due to increased marketing, but I hope that vaastu has helped."
