Creative Commons Malaysia Website Review

The Malaysian version of Creative Commons (CC) have been the talk since sometime last year. It was a sheer surprise to have the non-governing organization enter our shores and help budding talents protect their work whilst allowing them to share it online. Placing any work online has risk of plagiarism or piracy but CC tries to lessen these things.

What is Creative Commons about?

Creative Commons licenses, which are available on-line for free, have been vetted by lawyers and are legally-enforceable copyright licenses that allow an author to specify how the work may be used by others.

Though full online copyright laws is still in the works for Malaysia, this project that’s backed by the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC) under the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project is without a doubt a stepping stone for Malaysian designers, artistes, photographers and writers.

Enough about the great cause for CC to exist. If you’d like to learn more, please proceed to the Creative Commons website for further reading.

I’ve placed the CC organization’s website (left) and the CC Malaysia website (right) side-by-side for direct comparison.

Oops, forgot to mention that you can click either one for a larger version.

You’ll notice some similarities without a doubt between the international and the Malaysian version. I could understand that this is being done to produce a consistent theme of the CC websites.

I think CC Malaysia is one the more colourful jurisdictions in comparison with all the rest. But here are the things I’d like to pick one about the CC Malaysia website.

The top navigation bar text colour doesn’t contrast itself enough to be read properly and the bolding of the text doesn’t exactly help. The only time it becomes clear is when you rollover and the text becomes black. What’s so bad about default Windows/Apple text instead of rendered images?

The Flash media placed in the banner doesn’t exactly improve the identity or help add extra value to the banner nor the CC Malaysia website. Even being placed for an aesthetic purpose, it could be placed in a more prioritize area with an accompanied meaningful message.

The use of huge buttons for Find and Publish are a great thing to attract atention. However, with the existence of these then doesn’t it overshadow the other ‘Find. Publish.’ above? Redundancy has been assumingly overlooked here.

I think the Join Us should be placed upfront above the Find and Publish because CC Malaysia is new and we’re promoting the awareness at the same time the participation of everyone in the industry to register with CC Malaysia. Wait, it’s been placed below the Saerch which means it’s been given less importance.

The large coloured areas have helped define the content section of CC Malaysia but has overpowered the left sidebar which is the search along with the mini banners below. And again, there is repetition of links. Is promoting the CC Weblog really that important? Especially when it hasn’t even been updated since 16 January 2006.

The other thing I really feel the Fireworks Solution Sdn Bhd team should’ve understood or noticed is the size of the text used through the website. Not everyone is able to squint and read the (probably) 11px size with tight line spacing.

Also, I’m just wondering why the content area has been developed in a frame?

It isn’t my choice of being very hard on this review because I’m merely commiting an honest writeup of what I feel and think the team could’ve done better in terms of having the CC Malaysia website offer more value and focused towards its core existence.

What do the rest of you think?

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