Two months since I’ve last updated! It’s not the lack of activities in my life, it’s more the lack of “rajin-ness” to update. I’ll be off to Australia next week for a friend’s wedding, and then for a short holiday to New Zealand’s south island.

I finally got around to applying for my Australian visa yesterday. In the years since I’ve last gone to Australia, the visas are now electronic, and there’s no need to go to an embassy to apply! If you buy your airline ticket from a MAS agent’s office, they will apply for the visa on your behalf (free, I think?), but since I bought my ticket online during some promotion they had way back in March, I had to find out how to apply for the visa.

Googling Australian visa Malaysia brought up a whole list of results, most of them looked like travel agents offering the visa application service. I wasn’t sure which ones were reputable, and I didn’t want to simply apply via any website, so I checked with my auntie. It’s always helpful to have relatives that have businesses dealing with Australian migrations! She gave me the link to the official Australian immigration website. I was really impressed with the website, it’s got lots of pertinent information, and it’s really well presented.

Your eye is immediately drawn to the three colourful boxes, which highlight the most common reasons that people would be visiting the website. And another thing I love about it, is that the images of the people that are featured in those three boxes, are people of different races.

After clicking on the “Finding a Visa” box, you’re brought to a Visa Wizard page. You need to answer a few different questions, and it will display the different visas that would be appropriate for you. Still loving the usability of the website!

Anyway, it gave me a few different options, and I still wasn’t too sure which one to choose. After checking with my auntie again, she told me to apply for the ETA (Visitor) (subclass 976). I navigated around the site a bit, and it brought me to the Australian Government’s Electronic Travel Authority System.

It was an easy peasy process, I filled up the form (making sure I had my passport detalis), and then made payment via credit card (20 AUD), and within a few minutes, I had my Australian visa! I’m now ready to fly off to Australia anytime in the next year, for a max of 3 months.

So, why was I waxing lyrical about the Australian Immigration website? I work in an online ad agency, and I’m able to appreciate the “clean-ness” of the website, and how user-friendly it is. The whole process made me curious about Malaysia’s immigration site, so I Googled it up.

I found the Lama Web Rasmi Jabatan Imigresen Malaysia, roughly translated it would be..um..the Official Website for the Malaysian Immigration Department. (Sidenote: I wonder why they have to say it’s the official website? Are there many unofficial sites for the immigration department? Shouldn’t the fact that it’s a .gov.my website make it official already?) Anyway, this was the landing page of the “official website”.

OK, so it looks like a website that was developed in the ’90s, but…if there’s good content in there, who am I to complain? So I navigated further in. I thought to myself, most people who come to this site, should be visitors / people who want PRs / study visas, and that sort of thing. I’m not going to understand BM! Next step, clicked on the English link on the top right hand side of the page.

English Version is under construction?!? Well, they’ve just lost a lot of visitors to the website. I wonder how long it’ll be before the English version is up. I was curious about the colour selections that they had at the top of the website, so I tried clicking on the bright green colour.

My eyes, my eyes!! I was blinded by the brightness. Who chose that colour?? Furthermore, when you navigate to other pages, it changes back to the default blue colour. Red was just as bad, I won’t torture you with another picture. I’m not sure what the purpose of the colour changes was, it’s not useful at all. It seems more like they wanted it to seem like the website had a lot of functionality, so they threw that in.

I didn’t go through the website much more, except for the corporate information section. To me, that’s also not useful at all. Who would want to know what the Immigration Department’s song is? They’d have put their time to better use by coming up with an English version of the website instead. I wonder whether other countries have songs for their government departments?

The whole experience left me with a reinforced feeling that Australia is ahead of Malaysia by leaps and bounds in many areas, and we really need to buck up if we want to become a developed nation by the year 2020.