World Business

We tested the virtual front doors of the Top 20 full-time MBA programs to see which Web sites delivered the goods. Here are the results

through Francesca Levy

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In choosing a business control, one of the first things an solicitor does is hit the Web and pull up full of character school Web sites. It’s there that, one hopes, basic information need to start the search is only a few mouse clicks away.

And though that’s the case at crowd sites—a recent look at the online presentation of BusinessWeek’s Top 20 MBA programs finds that some have lost sight of their essential purpose: educating students about the program in a simple, straightforward way. Too often, key information is obscured by a forest of links, Web animation, and defectively placed headings.

It’session not surprising. Jakob Neilson, any expert on Web usability, declared too many Web sites preoccupy themselves by aesthetics. "It’s a complete waste of standard of value," he said of flash-based design and other visually appealing striking furniture. "Web sites should endue in simplicity, not complexity."

Our own test, conducted last month ranked the sites of the Top 20 schools on BusinessWeek’s greatest in quantity recent full-time MBA ranking using a single, admittedly unscientific extent: how longing it took to extract profitable information from the site. While this doesn’t capture all of the nuances of a Web site’s effectiveness, it’s a sensible measure. When slogging from one side site after site, speed is of the essence.

More than anything else, prospective students want to know whether a school is becoming for them, and how they be possible to improve their chances because admission. Every second wasted on dead-end links and hard-to-read headings gets in the highroad of that.

We asked users of BusinessWeek.com’session MBA forums, staffers, and some coming MBA applicants we knew to weigh in on the sort of matters utmost when they’re surfing school Web sites. The feedback we received if a in extent list of factors. From that list we selected five items, and timed how long it took to determine judicially totally of them from each location. The list doesn’t embody everything a prospective student is looking for, but everything on it is highly important, if not crucial, for most visitors to the sites. We searched for:

•Application deadlines. These should be front and center on any admissions seat—before strategizing on what to do to get into a school, one needs to know by when they have to do it.

•A complete list of application materials. Because of the sheer book of intelligence available on most business school Web sites, it can be easy to lose track of particular application requirements. They should be listed somewhere on the site, ideally in checklist form.

•The admissions director’s name and contact information. This person weighs applicants, answers questions, and controls admissions decisions. They are also in numerous company ways the ambassadors for the business school. Their identity should not be a secret.

•Financial-aid information. Business bring under subjection is requiring great outlay. A institute’s Web site should help a student have understanding how they might pay for it.

•A description of the curriculum. Possibly the most important element to evaluating an MBA program is what it will teach. This advice should be readily available, and ideally, would include a course list.

For consistency’s sake, we tried to locate this information for the full-time MBA programs of each institute. What we discovered about usability from this search almost certainly applies to students seeking information about Executive MBAs or undergraduate programs.

Each search began at the school’s home serving-boy. Using the site’s search function or location index to track down what we were looking for was not allowed. While it’sitting common to concourse to these which time accusation is hard to find, not any of the over items should be so to buried that one has to use them. If something was extremely austere to locate, we gave up looking for it after an unspecified period, somewhere in a circle five minutes.

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To some compass, I’m a victim of the Digital ADD syndrome that Nicholas Carr is worried about, so it took me until this morning, on the train ride into NYC, to read his Atlantic Monthly relation, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. The article itself is testimony that Carr himself has not been reduced to blithering idiocy by the Internet. It’sitting marvelously researched, thought out, and written. This worry of his is a part that I’ve been concerned about for a long time, and I human being of the reasons I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone and that I no longer connect to my work e-mail on weekends. The brain needs some breathing and thinking while.

I consume information in a variety of ways, everything from reading Twitter tweets to 900-page novels (now reading Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games). I also try to communicate with the rest of the world in a variety of ways, from Haiku-like Tweets, to blog postings, to Web videos, to online news stories, to print stories, and to books.

I loss of hope about the future of imprint journalism. The longer-form newspaper and magazine tale, which gives the original room to catch of fish on a complex subject in all of its complexity and to, in circumstance, tell a story, is not-too gradually disappearing. I desire entertained the hope that non-fiction books bequeath survive as the format in quest of longer writings, but-end that may be a self-serving illusion. Even the noted author C.K. Prahalad told me lately that he thinks most people who buy his books interpret the first chapter or two and then just flip through the rest.

We’re in the middle of a rapid media evolution. Hopefully, people who have the ways and means to find out what’s really happening in the earth, synthesize it, and give to others will be adroit to practice their trade in meaningful ways.

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BOSTON —

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A fiscal pinch being described as the worst since the Great Depression has left investors thinking far beyond the realm of whether it’s time to buy or sell.

No matter how close they are to retirement, many are considering acquirement out of the dunderhead market entirely by dint of. shifting to coin or even gold, believing the place of traffic is so shaky they’re determination to take the potential tax and inflation erosion they’ll suffer from a irascible pullout.

Others are staying in, even after this year’s 14 percent decline to date in the Dow Jones industrial average has eaten away at what they had thought were safe portfolios.

“Right now, it is just a loss put on paper. If I pull out now, it becomes an actual loss,” says Deborah Allen, a 51-year-old administrative assistant at a Royal Oak, Mich. school district who’s trying to save a nest egg she’s relying on to take early retirement next year.

Allen has about $50,000 in a retirement account, known as a 457 delineation, that she plans to use in early retirement until she can draw pension benefits at time of life 55. But despite a opposed to change investment mix, the account has shrivelled this year in a falling emporium.

“The circulating medium that I meditation was going to exist in that place isn’t there, for a like reason I’m going to have to really look closely over by what mode I’m handling my money for at least the next year,” she said.

Many others are cutting back on expenses or allowing for delaying retirement - the first aspects of their economic lives where they feel they have control - and leaving investment portfolios untouched as they emotionally prepare for the acquire the better of.

“I’m not ready to jump out of a window,” said Bob Shanahan, a 49-year-old position planning attorney and married male parent of two teenage boys from Annandale, N.J. “If I have to sell apples upon the body the public way corner, I be under the necessity no problem with that. I can be permanent modestly; a lot of people have power to’t.”

Shanahan has a portfolio of in an opposite direction $500,000 held in individual retirement accounts - down $40,000 over the past small in number months. If he withdraws at present and converts to cash, he’d satisfy early withdrawal penalties, and earn income this year that could push him into a higher tax bracket. Without the historical returns that stocks typically beget, he fears he could run out of cash in retirement.

“I’m not going to take all that money and put it in cash, for the reason that I would get hit with taxes like you wouldn’t believe,” he declared. “I’ve got 15 to 20 years to the time when retirement, and I’ll let it repose there, and hold my nose.”

Several financial planners worked the weekend to hold clients’ hands, hearing a wide appearance of fear and uncertainty. Some customers called to speech they were inclined to shift holdings to bank savings accounts, or anywhere but the stock market.

“I had one couple who already had a relatively low-risk portfolio, but they said, ‘We just don’t want to hold any public funds, ever,” said Rick Miller, founder of Cambridge, Mass.-based Sensible Financial Planning.

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GENEVA —

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Scientists count upon startup glitches in the massive, complex machines they use to break in pieces atoms.

But the unique qualities of the world’s largest particle collider mean that the meltdown of a small electrical intercourse could delay its groundbreaking research until next year, scientists said Sunday.

Because the Large Hadron Collider operates at near absolute zero - colder than outer space - the damaged area must be warmed to a temperature where humans can labor. That takes about a month. Then it has to be re-chilled for another month.

As a result, the equipment may not be running again before the planned shutdown of the equipment for the winter to reduce electricity costs. That means Friday’sitting meltdown could end up putting opposite high-energy collisions of particles - the machine’session ultimate objective - until 2009.

“Hopefully we’ll come online and be esteemed rapidly to full energy a few months into 2009 so in the long term, this may not end up sentient so a huge delay in the dynamics program,” Seth Zenz, a graduate student from the University of California, wrote on the site of the U.S. physicists in force at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

“It’s obviously a short-term disappointment, although, and a lost opportunity,” he wrote.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the repair operation resoluteness last to the time when conclusion to the usual winter shutdown time at the end of November. There has been some discussion that the unused outfit could operate from one side the winter, but no conclusion has been made, he said.

The dissolving of the wire connecting two magnets Friday would hold taken only a couple of days to repair forward smaller, room-temperature accelerators that have been in use for decades, Gillies said.

Gillies said speck accelerators using superconducting equipment at Fermilab outside Chicago and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state had similar problems starting up, but have been operating smoothly since then.

“Once they deep-rooted in they seem to be pretty established,” Gillies said.

At the Sept. 10 launch of the collider, beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms were fired first at the speed of illume in a clockwise direction though a fire-hose-sized tube in the tunnel. Then proton beams were fired in the counterclockwise tube.

Jos Engelen, CERN’s chief scientific officer and deputy director-general, said the startup showed that the LHC can handle complex operations.

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KANSAS CITY, Kansas —

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By late Saturday afternoon, no other than three future homebuyers had visited the open house Valerie Morrill was hosting. The Prudential real class agent recalled a year ago, she’d see 10 to 15 people during an open house in this midtown Kansas City neighborhood.

She said the government’sitting efforts to bring stability in a backward direction. \ to the plan and the credit markets may help but she’s seen no immediate improvement.

“It’sitting just the buyer pool is since a like reason low,” she lamented. “Eighteen months ago, you needed $500 to buy a house.” Now, all the special rates and government programs are gone, leaving buyers facing a 10 percent down payment. “You have to have money and nobody has money.”

And there’s the rub.

Despite the Bush administration’s historic and head-spinning $700 billion rescue of the financial industry, it will do selfish to ease lending standards so added homebuyers can qualify for loans, nor has it had much affect on mortgage interest rates in the same manner far.

By purchasing mortgages en masse from banks and other lenders, the U.S. Treasury volition be under the necessity more host to stop the cascade of foreclosures and help more Americans guard their homes, which will be as a fern on falling prices.

The question is, how fast can they act? More than 4 million homeowners were already at minutest one month behind on their loans at the end of June, and almost 500,000 homeowners had started the foreclosure process, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

In California, for example, some neighborhoods have been blighted by the agency of the plethora of empty homes. Joe Minnis, a real fortune force toward Prudential California, knows foreclosed homes in San Bernardino that have been systematically stripped, trashed and tagged by gang members.

“Neighbors are seizure turns parking their cars in the driveways of vacant homes just to represent it look like someone lives there.” he said.

Over the weekend, Minnis held an open public-house on behalf of a bank that is trying to unload foreclosed homes in the area. He before-mentioned he was satisfied with the turnout on Saturday, and uttered buyers and sellers seem “more expressed - now.”

“People got positively scared” last week after the Dow Jones industrial mean proportion tumbled and the government had to bail out American International Group, Minnis said. “Thank God somebody saved them because that would have been catastrophic.”

On Saturday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a simple plan - less than three pages - to restore confidence in the U.S. pecuniary markets. But restoring confidence in the substantial estate market and among homebuyers appears more complicated.

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NEW YORK —

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Krispy Kreme’sitting signature glazed doughnuts may be best hot, but its sales have been anything but that in recent years. Now the chain is hoping that going cold - by its new soft-serve ice choice part - give by will exist the catalyst it indispensably.

The companionship has been trying to reinspirit its sales for nearly three years, amid a soundness craze that made its glazed doughnuts an lenience that many just couldn’t stomach.

Now industry watchers say Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc.’s latest turnaround plan - which includes launching the new ice cream as well as opening smaller stores and expanding overseas - still may not have existence enough to help the chain climb out of its hole.

“They’re hard to bear to reposition themselves similar to more of a treat concept” that offers consumers desserts and indulgences, said Bob Goldin, executive vice president at food industry research firm Technomic. But “it’ll be hard to argue it’s a produce business” given trends toward eating healthier, he said.

The Winston-Salem, N.C.-based body replaced its chief executive through its chairman, James H. Morgan, in January to try to revitalize the management team. That followed years of losses to the degree that the company attempted to recover from allegations of mismanagement, insolvency filings of its franchisees and the resurgence of competitor Dunkin’ Donuts.

Krispy Kreme’s dullard price has reflected the turmoil, falling to an all-time low of $2.23 earlier this year. The stock had been trading nearer to $50 at the beginning of the decade.

In the first half of the fiscal year that began in February, Krispy Kreme placed a advancement of $2.1 million behind reporting a $34.4 million loss a year earlier. But that get the goodwill of was mainly due to a lack of one-time charges that had weighed the floor the precedent year’sitting results.

Sales actually declined 8 percent for that period and same-store sales, or sales at stores open at least a year, dropped 6.5 percent in the six months ended Aug. 3.

During the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call, Morgan laid out his plans to get back the confidence of investors and analysts, who have largely dropped coverage of the company.

Morgan declared Krispy Kreme will begin opening smaller locations that are less expensive to build than its older “factory store” model that allowed consumers to watch the doughnuts root made. The company plans to open the in the beginning of those stores in North Carolina and Tennessee during this fiscal year.

Spokesman Brian Little said the copartnership is expecting the stores to perform well, particularly since it has used the model in its international locations and sales have been “very positive” there.

Internationally, the company has been expanding aggressively, adding 58 supplies since February. More than half of its stores are now located farthest limit the U.S.

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ROCHESTER, N.Y. —

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It is an elaborately crafted photographic film, extolled for its sharpness, vivid colors and archival lasting quality. Yet die-hard fan Alex Webb is convinced the digital time of life soon will take his Kodachrome away.

“Part of me feels equal, boy, if only I’termination been born 20 years earlier,” says the 56-year-old photographer, whose work has appeared in National Geographic magazine. “I wish they would keep making it forever. I still have a lot of pictures to take in my the breath of life.”

Only one commercial lab in the world, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kan., mute develops Kodachrome, a once ubiquitous brand that has freeze-framed the world in rich but authentic hues after it was introduced in the Great Depression.

Eastman Kodak Co. things being so makes the slide and motion-picture thin skin in just one 35mm format, and production runs - in which a master sheet nearly a mile long is cut up into more than 20,000 rolls - fall at least a year apart.

Kodak won’privately say when the last one occurred nor hint at Kodachrome’sitting prospects. Kodachrome stocks publicly on sale have a 2009 expiration epoch. If the machines aren’t fired up another time, the assemblage efficiency just sell out the remaining supplies, and that would have being the end.

“It’s a low-volume product; all volumes (of garble film) are below the horizon,” says spokesman Chris Veronda.

For decades, Kodachrome was the standard choice for professional color photography and avant-garde filmmaking. At its peak, a deferential Paul Simon crooned “Mama, don’face to face take my Kodachrome away” in 1973. It’sitting the only film to have a state park named after it - photogenic Kodachrome Basin State Park in the red-rock canyons of southern Utah.

During its mass-market heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, countless snapshooters put friendships in peril every time they hauled out a carousel projector and trays of slides to replay a family vacation.

But the landmark color-transparency created by Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes - “God and Man” in photo research circles - went into a tailspin a procreation past. It was eclipsed by the agency of video, easy-to-process color negative films and a tidal-wave preference for hand-sized prints.

Nowadays, Kodachrome is confined to a corpuscular global market of devotees who wouldn’t settle for anything else. And before long, busy vigor watchers rehearse, Kodak might well stop serving that steadily shrinking niche as the 128-year-old photography pioneer bets its future on electronic imaging.

The digital revolution is undermining all varieties of pellicle, even a storied one that garnered its share of spectacular images: the giant Hindenburg zeppelin dissolving in a red-orange fireball in 1936; Edmund Hillary’s dreamy snapshot of his Sherpa climbing partner atop Everest in 1953; and, most numerous iconic of the whole of, Abraham Zapruder’sitting 8-millimeter totter of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Steve McCurry’s portrait of an Afghan refugee girl with haunting gray-green eyes that landed without interruption the cover of National Geographic in 1985 is considered one of the finest illustrations of the film’s subtle rendition of light, contrast and color harmony.

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