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

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:

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

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