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?
tak ada link to Malaysia CC website? :P
I think many malaysians still like colorful and animations in the website…
Yeah, you forgot to place a link to the Malaysian CC website.
On the website itself, I was quite disappointed to find quite a few errors in English spelling and grammar – not what I’d expect from a high-profile site e.g. “Interested to become a MSC Status Company?” Sheesh.
Oops, no wonder I thought I forgot something. Sorry about that.
The website sucks:
1. Accessibility is severely limited through the non-semantic table design. Lots of images and spacers are used liberally throughout the site without any alt attributes.
2. Links to outside pages are opened in a page with a stupid header: “You are viewing an external page outside of the CreativeCommons Malaysia site.” Even the CC Weblog and the Worldwide site is considered an ‘external page’
3. IT USES FRAMES!!!! How 1992!!!
4. Content isn’t very good either. Besides what they copied and pasted from the official worldwide site, information is poorly presented. Look at the news and events, or articles page.
5. Clicking the logo in the banner doesn’t bring you to the home page. You have to click the small ‘home’ link instead.
6. The Find page doesn’t have any local content. Why have a local site when you can’t find any local CC content??
I could go on and on, but my opening words said it all: The website sucks.
Fireworks Solutions obviously are just a bunch of graphic designers who know how to slice their photoshop images and export them into websites. I’m ashamed of the local web design industry.
I’m really, really disappointed with the site and that’s why I link to the Worldwide site instead of the local one from my blog.
So there, you have it. My 2 cents haha.
Btw Danny, your comment preview page still hasn’t been fixed.
I’m pretty much guilty for that without saying. And all I can say is that it’s still like that because I’m still sticking myself with this default MT stylesheet.
Sorry about that.
sigh, why iframe? Now the entire content of the site is not search-engine friendly, not to mention people using screenreader cant see a shit.
How are you going to get traffic exposure like that? Cmon people…
I absolutely agree with your review and David’s comments, the website sucks.
It’s a shame, the “people” who designed it will make our country fall backwards. I mean, CreativeCommons Malaysia will probably be viewed/used by lots of creatives here, not just web peeps but designers, musicians, film-makers, ect., it should (at least) be of good quality and be made an example. The website not only fails in accessibility & usability, it’s information architecture fails miserably.
When I visited the website after reading an article about it in TheStar Intech, I had high hopes, CC after all is a good thing. Unfortunately, it’s obvious CC Malaysia will be no-good unless they get properly skilled people to run the site.
My 2sen :)