Hotel School Redesign a So-So
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?
| This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 12:58 am and is tagged with weird menu, code lt, png format, time estimator, hotel school, type images, microsoft publisher, css file, autocomplete, loading time, textual content, drop down list, text content, css files, tagline, ie 7, markup, artifacts, safari, source code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can http://cornell.elliottback.com/hotel-school-redesign-a-so-so/trackback/. |
2 Responses to “Hotel School Redesign a So-So”
I expected the links at the top to make themselves known when I roll over them, but they just change color
The design does seem slightly out of date to me. However, I'm not a web designer and maybe this design was deemed the most user-friendly…
It does remind me of a free wordpress template though!