A touch of vastu

A Delhi-based interior designer claims to incorporate the five elements to increase traffic on your site. Labonita Ghosh logs on.

Did you know that your website has a zodiac sign? That it has the five basic elements, namely earth, air, fire, water and space? And that — with a little help from Delhi-based interiors designer Smita Jain Narang — its ‘prospects’ can be improved?

If your website is not getting enough hits, it might need a touch of vastu shastra. Narang (she prefers the more appropriate address of Dr Smita) recently started analysing websites to see how they can become more ‘vastu-compliant’, thereby generating more visitor-traffic and business for the host.

“Websites, like our universe, are made of five fundamental elements,” says Narang. “You can fix something that’s going wrong by applying the rules of vastu shastra.” In other words, the 30-year-old interior designer-turned-vastu guru brings together what she calls an ancient science with a spanking new one: the internet.

Puzzling? Here’s how she looks at it. Everything about a website correlates with one of the five basic elements. The site’s layout is earth, graphics and fonts are like the water; the html is like air, colours represent fire and the URL is space. “I analyse sites to see if the elements have been arranged in the most harmonious manner possible, and suggest changes if they aren’t,” adds Narang.

Four years ago, Narang, who did her MPhil and PhD in this 8,000-year-old ‘science’ from Mumbai’s Zoroastrian College, started by studying her own interiors site because she was “getting a lot of fame but not enough finance”. She simply changed the name, and the hits kept coming. Now, she’s written a book on web vastu, and plans to begin consulting, charging anywhere between Rs5,000 and Rs10,000 a site.

Narang has already analysed about 500 pages of the B2B marketing portal, Indiamart. “She suggested changes, some of which we were able to incorporate,” says Amit Gundh, internet manager at Indiamart. “We had to be careful; one small change can disturb a lot of elements on the site. But we found Narang’s predictions to be about 70 per cent accurate.” As for visitors, the portal got a mixed response to some of the changes incorporated on five of the client websites they host. “Traffic increased on two sites, and went down on another two; on one it remained steady,” adds Gundh.

Narang has analysed many sites — eBay (“the Indian site is better laid out for hits than the US one”), naukri.com (“good layout, but too much expenditure on the water element; they’re unlikely to get back what they’ve spent”) and bharatmatrimony.com (“it’s perfect — four of the five elements are balanced”), though she hasn’t heard back from any of them yet.

But web designers are sceptical about Narang’s claim to improve sites with vastu. “There are some vital things she clearly does not take into consideration,” says designer Saumil Gandhi. “Content is the most important thing for hits, and what about loading time. If a site takes too long to load, I would not visit it again.”

According to Pragati Ray-D’souza, creative head at Indigo Consulting, a web designing firm, it’s hard to imagine Narang applying vastu rules to a site since it has no directions. “One of the things in vastu is identifying propitious corners and directions,” says Ray-D’souza. “How can you find that on a site?” Narang agrees with both contentions, and says she will keep these in mind when she starts consulting.

“It can take lakhs of rupees to set up, manage and run a site,” she says. “Surely, anyone would want to improve their chances.” Whether or not her brand of web vastu can work, will surely require a crystal ball gazer to tell.