iElectrify

The practice of Feng Shui is all about maintaining balance, harmony and positive energy within your home and your personal space.   Having a good “flow” of positive energy is important for your website too. 

Whether you’re considering a new design or looking for ways to freshen up an old one, you can learn a lot by applying this ancient art to your site design and layout. 

Use Color Effectively for Best Results

A large part of Feng Shui is based in the correct use of color schemes.  For example, corresponding colors such as beiges, browns and creams create an atmosphere of earthiness, which in turn promotes a sense of warmth, comfort and reliability.   Shades of blue can be calming, relaxing and refreshing while metallic colors like white and grey create an air of clarity, purpose and precision.

Too much of one color can be downright boring and predictable, though.  Consider adding a splash of color from the opposite end of the spectrum or color wheel to help highlight important information you want your visitors to notice and take action on.  A huge wealth of beautiful and captivating color schemes can be found in the Color Schemer Gallery.  

Busyness is Bad for Business

Homepages are especially vulnerable to “busyness”.  With screen resolutions getting larger and larger, designers have been pushed to include more and more content on the homepage.  The result is complex navigation, text broken up by annoying ads and multiple calls to action (each leading to a different place!) 

By giving your users so many choices, you run the serious risk of alienating them altogether.  If there’s no “flow” – no rhyme or reason as to why different elements appear on your page, you can bet your visitors aren’t going to hunt around and try to figure it out.  

Keep the elements on your page from crowding each other out.  Give your navigation, links and text room to breathe.  Take an objective look at your ads and ask yourself if they’re competing with your content for your reader’s attention and whether or not that’s really the best use of that traffic you worked so hard to get in the first place.

Clear Out the Visual Noise

Beyond being just plain busy, some sites suffer from too much visual noise.  News and ecommerce sites are particularly bad about this.  They’re from the “Ready, Fire, Aim” school of design which states that you should give your users as many choices as possible to see where they go and restructure later.  Graduates of this type of design hate cutting things out because there’s always the haunting feeling that someone, somewhere may want to view the Employee Profile photos from 1998. 

Your site should be all about balance.  Thankfully, whitespace is coming back in style and it’s a smart idea to make good use of it.  Just because you can cram everything onto one page doesn’t mean you should.   Balance out long product descriptions with plenty of professional photos.  If your product is digital, a 3D cover really helps it to stand out.  Break up text into “chunks” that your readers can easily scan with their eyes (which is what they’re doing anyway) and use images that add to – not distract from – your content.

In the end, having “good Feng Shui” for your site is about purposeful design elements and a clear path to action.  It’s also about capturing and controlling the flow of your site and pages.  When all of the elements work together, you’ll start to see a new kind of “positive energy” from your site – in the form of visitors and customers spreading the word and coming back for more!

Tags: color schemes, feng shui, page clutter, white space