Earth: Layout
Water: Navigation
Air: Content
Fire: Adding Multimedia
Earth: Layout
Water: Navigation
Air: Content
Fire: Adding Multimedia
In Feng Shui, fire represents energy that is moving upward, bright, and intense Fire symbolizes the maximum expansion and activity.
For the purpose of web design, fire is designated as the spark of creativity and flash that you can add to a page via multimedia. Embedding sounds, images, and even movies and animations can make a page come alive.
However, as with true fire, playing with web fire can be dangerous. Too much spark and the reader/viewer can feel burned and overloaded. Even worse, complex multimedia can be difficult to implement and may even cause your pages to crash or load so slowly that viewers go elsewhere.
Here are some helpful guidelines for implementing media in your pages:
1. Use media sparingly: A well placed picture or animation can have great impact. Too many of such items on a page and the viewer doesn't know where to look.
2. Repetitive sounds drive readers crazy: A little music or a sound effect now and then can add to the atmosphere of a page. Too many sounds can grow annoying very quickly. Avoid looping music. If you must include music be sure to include audio controls that allow the user to turn the music off.
3. Size counts: File size for all kinds of media can be unwieldy. For users with dial-up connections, these large files can mean minutes wasted waiting for an image to load. Certain file formats compact images to managable sizes so be sure to check the file format of your pictures.
4. Copyright: Many of the images and other media on the Internet are copyrighted material. Merely copying someone else's image to your page does not make that image legally yours.
5. Animations may take plug-ins: Some animations, in formats such as Flash and Fireworks, may require the reader to download software to enable the animations to be seen. This can be troublesome to some novice web users.
