The Feng Shui of Web Design

In the teachings of Feng Shui, earth energy is stable, balanced, and grounded. In times of turmoil and change earth stabilizes you. Placing stone or marble objects in the correct places provides you with the grounding powers of the earth.

In web design, your layout, your page design is the consistency that exists beneath your content. If you have a stable layout design your pages will be simple to build and manage. This stability increases the chance that your pages will look the same in any browser and over time.

General Rules for a "Peaceful" Page Layout and Design

1. Do not divide the page into halves: Dividing a page in half makes it difficult for the viewer to know where their attention should be directed. You want your documents to be visually exciting, and one of the best ways to do that is to divide the page into thirds (either vertically or horizontally), and then place the most important objects (headings, photos, visuals) in the top or bottom third. For example, on the page you are viewing now, the screen is split into three vertical columns. The left most column is the navigation bar. The center, wider, column contains the body text. The left most column contains an image. The pages on this site follow this format fairly consistently so viewers will know where to look to get what they want.

2. Avoid using too many boxes: Boxes and rules can be a good way to show off important information. Just make sure everything isn't in a box, or nothing will stand out from the crowd. As a general rule, one box per page (besides navigation boxes) is enough.

3. Do not force viewers to scroll horizontally. Few things are more annoying than having to actually pick up your mouse and move a Web page over to the right. To scroll down all you have to do is hit page down, but there's no shortcut to get your page to scroll horizontally. The best way to avoid a horizontally scrolling page is to make sure you check out your Web pages at resolutions of 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768. Simply adjusting the resolution of your own monitor and viewing the page you have built in a browser will allow you to test this.

4. Have no more than three screens of information on a single page. People don't like to scroll horizontally, but they're not overly fond of paging down forever either. The rule of thumb is that any one Web page shouldn't require a viewer to page down more than three screens. People will scroll if the content is there. You need to balance content and nuisance factor with having to click through on links. As a general rule, if your content takes up more than three screens some of it should be put on another page. Conversely, if the content doesn't fill a full page, there is no need to create a new page to link to.

5. Use contrasting colors for readability. Dark text on a light background is easy to read. It goes without saying that dark text on a dark background, or light text on a light background, is difficult to read. You need to make sure that there's enough contrast between your text and background for the text to be readable. Light text on a dark background is also easy to read, but it should be used sparingly. It's more tiring to the eyes to read large amounts of text on a dark background.

6. Use color sparingly. You choose to design in more than one color for one reason: for impact. If color is thrown around everywhere, it loses its impact. Make sure that you use color for maximum impact: for headings, or even the most important words in headings.

7. Do not use complementary colors. Complementary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, such as blue and orange or red and green. When these two colors are used side by side, the eye has trouble focusing on both at the same time, and the colors may actually seem to vibrate. Don't combine these colors in text and try to avoid using them as backgrounds of adjoining boxes.

*This content was adapted from the About.com web design section.