This article was just too good to pass up posting about about - Firms in India turning to the ancient philosophies of vaastu shastra and Chinese feng shui to boost their businesses through "balanced" Web pages.  While some  entertain such ideas as a matter of speculation others are actually designing sites based on ancient ideas that have nothing to with a Website.

"Earth is the layout, fire is the color, air is the HTML, space is name of the Web site, and water is the font and graphics," says Narang, adding that each must be chosen carefully and strike a balance with the other."

….."Narang, a vaastu expert who has spent four years analyzing around 500 sites, says a Web site that is not designed according to vaastu rules will have few hits and will negatively affect the business.

So some search engine optimizers, who reverse engineer the search algorithms, are really  just vaastu followers that don’t yet realize their true calling! Does that include the "Black Hat Seo" sect?  What about the "Yellow Hat" and "White Hat" Seo variety?

"A Web site where the colors 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."

"Experts say using a combination of astrology and numerology, the ancient sciences will help you choose the right colors, font, placement of graphics and navigation bar to make the perfect Web site."

And I love this statement from the article:

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

I don’t know…… I guess it falls in line with the other stuff I hear when I go to Search Engine Strategies and listen to MulitChannel Metrics - where all of the data we collect gets reduced to a couple of "hunting" journey’s, much like the ancient caveman who hunted Dear and painted their caves in recognition of the hunt.  Some of it …maybe….

 I’m not saying I don’t believe in this stuff - I do think some of it may even be valid as far as it might go - and I even brought up the idea of hunting for data like cavemen are hunting for deer. 

Still, I don’t know if a website can be thought of as a house - where sections of the site are rooms and the arrangements of elements on the pages would be the same thing as the arrangement of the elements of a house.  Maybe those changes, if they worked, would up conversions - but could we really say the Search Engines are going to favor those sites as well?     I guess there’s a limit on how far I’m willing to go.