Oddly enough, the high-graphic Apple-like website gives it a `less serious` feel. Apple-like websites primarily try to sell something, whereas a government website's more or less sole purpose is to present information.
An example of website that presents information well is Wikipedia (but it could do better.) Essentially, the driving factors in a website like this should be: 1) Is the information well-organized? 2) Is it easy to find? 3) Is it well presented?
However this website seems to put an undue emphasis on presentation and graphics (with the large background picture of the police men and two vehicles taking up much of the page.) Compare this with Wikipedia, where snippets of information, news highlights and other interesting tidbits of information from their vast encyclopedia populate the front page. Milwaukee police does do that in their second page, but too much of the index page contains fancy ad-like imagery. To me, it looks like they're trying to raise the public opinion of the department.
Wow - I disagree that this is well designed. It also looks half finished (lot of links are dead, many others are unclickable when they should be) - I'm guessing this is a work in progress from an agency?
At least with Chrome on Linux is really sluggish when scrolling. It's like they have something on place to make the scrolling slower... or a lot of JavaScript code on each scroll event.
An example of website that presents information well is Wikipedia (but it could do better.) Essentially, the driving factors in a website like this should be: 1) Is the information well-organized? 2) Is it easy to find? 3) Is it well presented?
However this website seems to put an undue emphasis on presentation and graphics (with the large background picture of the police men and two vehicles taking up much of the page.) Compare this with Wikipedia, where snippets of information, news highlights and other interesting tidbits of information from their vast encyclopedia populate the front page. Milwaukee police does do that in their second page, but too much of the index page contains fancy ad-like imagery. To me, it looks like they're trying to raise the public opinion of the department.