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Earth: Layout

Water: Navigation

Air: Content

Fire: Adding Multimedia

About the Author

Feng Shui considers water's energy capable of creating great concentration and stillness.

Here, we use water as a symbol for the flow of this concentration through a seamless navigation scheme within a web page.

Navigation schemes are an important element in page design. If your readers can't figure out how to get to the information they need they will, without doubt, leave your site in favor of one that is more organized.

These guidelines assume that your goal in design is consistency and ease of navigation. If you are interested in something more "off the wall" then you may want to ignore these rules.

1. Be consistent: The navigation tools for your page (like the green bar at the left) should be the same on every page. This allows readers to go to any page at any time and never reach a dead end.

2. Make the navigation clear: Navigation tools should look like navigation tools. Images can be fun to integrate into your site but replacing navigation text with images can be confusing and will certainly confound any reader who opts to turn images off due to bandwidth constraints or other reasons.

3. Links should look like links: If you are using text for links be sure to set the page properties so that link text is a different color than the regular text. Note that the links on this page are burgundy while non-hotlinked text is black.

Water: Navigating Streams of Information
Images of water are as effective as water itself when seeking the power of the water element. Image source.