Malaysian .gov’s

You see, I found this leaflet about the new RM5 polymer banknote issued by the central bank of Malaysia. I read with great interest and headed to their website for more information.

And wow, I actually found a Malaysian .gov (governmental) website worthy of the ‘good’ title. Really, its simple, efficient, unbloated, and frequently updated (last update was today). Although its design and graphics doesn’t stand out, at least it doesn’t scare visitors away like what Malaysian .gov websites have in common:

Animated gifs, especially flashing ones, are most annoying. Just take a look at this:

Distracting, ugly and useless. As if trying to please a 3-year-old. geez

Apart from that, are those with really, really poor choice of colours. Do you need a different colour for every link, every button, every coulumn of text? Even so, for crying out loud, stick to a colour scheme. Nobody wants to look at a website with green banners, red, orange or pink buttons, blue, black or red text or pink, flashing “NEW”� gifs in every corner! Sometimes, it really makes me wonder if their web designers are colour-blind ifyougetwhatimean.

Gosh, there are so many things to cover: Fonts: not only they are poorly chosen, some are even resized, skewed, stretched until they are barely readable:

Flash movies: I just dont understand the need of flash movies of text/pictures scaling in and out, rolling up and down, rotating here and there. They are simply ugly, useless and slows loading time.

Another thing that never fails to appear at these sites are those javascripted auto-scrolling boxes with (outdated) announements/news/updates. Maybe its just me, but I find them equally annoying and ugly.

What I really, really couldnt stand are these:

Countless “new”� labels everywhere! Arent they just annoying? What’s ironic is that you see these “new” labels everywhere when the line at the bottom of the page says: Last updated: May 2000.

Outdated .gov websites: If you can’t afford to update your webstie daily or even weekly then why even include something which needs to be updated? Wouldn’t a static and informative website do, rather than greeting visitors with 2-year-old announements?

Now of course, there are some of them worth mentioning here:

Public Works Department
Professional looking, though a little bloated. Very nice header.

Malaysian Industrial Development Authority

Customs
The intro is simply stunning, but I wouldnt advise you to go further in..

Malaysian Board of Architects
Minimalistic design. Not suprising though, as expected from architects aka people with taste

These websites are sadly the first impressions to people wanting to know more about our country. Not only they are not informative, they are outdated and can be of no use to potential tourists in need of information. sigh