Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

I was reading Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Banker: And Other Baller Things You Only Get to Say If You Work On Wall Street and came across this hilarious quote about Cornell, under the heading of “Third Tier” schools:

School Slogan: “Cornell–Mediocrity Delivered”

Most people don’t realize that three out of the seven of Cornell’s undergraduate schools are publicly funded, but most people do realize that all seven are lucky to have been part of whatever blunder placed them in the Ivy League. Cornell produces top “scholars” in two things: agriculture and hoteling; everyone else is stoked on whatever finance job or gorge they’re lucky enough to land in.

The book, by the way, is hilarious.

The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University has been listed as the 17th Best Business School by US News and World Reports.

If you’ve noticed, the Hotel school page got a redesign recently! It looks much cleaner now:

The website has valid markup and appears to render correctly in Firefox, IE 7, and Safari 3. However, there are a few things that could use improvement:

1) Too many objects

If you look at a loading time estimator or dig into their source code, you’ll see that they actually have 5 CSS files totaling 53.3 KB of data. These should be combined into a single CSS file to reduce the loading time. Additionally, some work should be done to reduce the number of images (28) on the page. The tagline-red-short, tagline-red, and stripe-type images could be replaced with CSS styling.

2) No compression

The website’s textual content, which is 63.2 kb, is uncompressed. Using my mod_deflate tutorial they could reduce their text content to 19 kb. They could probably shave another 10 kb by using the png format instead of ancient, and proprietary gif. Basically, 1/3 of the data on that page could be losslessly reduced!

3) Weird menu links

I expected the links at the top to make themselves known when I roll over them, but they just change color. Here is a more usable idea:

4) No autocomplete

When I start typing Statler, you guys should know what Statler is and present a drop-down list of things which might lead to Statler, or Stately Dinners, or Statistics in the Hotel School:

5) No RSS feeds

Um, there is no RSS feed for your news. So, how am I supposed to keep informed? You don’t *actually* expect me to come by and visit this page all the time, do you?

6) Ugly features links colors

Take a look at this, it’s like something from a bad Microsoft Publisher template:

7) Inconsistent calendar colors

The colors on the Calendar vary randomly. Perhaps that is intended to convey information I don’t understand, but it looks very weird:

Development artifacts

Things like this shouldn’t be left in your code:

<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/main-section-template.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->

9) A lonely footer

The footer is way too sparse for my taste:

Overall it’s a nice redesign, but it looks half-done. There’s nothing special about it, so I wonder what the hotel school really offers. This is in contrast to the homepage redesign, which makes Cornell look alive and dynamic, but light years ahead of the CS department (which 404s if you don’t use the www fake subdomain). The best Cornell redesign site, though, is Engineering, which looks awesome. Any thoughts, Christian?