I went in search of information on my local police department’s web site. Evidently they had a recent site redesign and boy is it pretty….too bad it’s completely useless!

One would think that a government entity’s web site’s primary purpose would be to provide information.  Oh, not in the case of Dekalb County Georgia’s Police Department.  In fact, I needed information specifically from their Animal Control division….and the link  I found by searching on Google (http://dekalbpolice.com/ac/) is a dead link…so I began my hunt on their main page. (Using the search feature only produced a results page and every link on it was broken, page not found)

Time to dig deeper…

Look at all of the pretty pictures of our acting police chief and police officers!  I can watch videos and even apply to the police academy.  I clicked on "Departments" then scrolled down through the listing of departments…finally finding a link to "Program Operations"….the description: "Click here to find information about the Animal Control Division, Personnel, Supply, Grants & Planning, Financial Services."….and click I did.

What did I see you might ask? A pretty picture of the Commander of Programs Operations, with a link to the names of all of his "Key Staff". Not a single bit of information.

Annoyed, I decide I want to use their "Feedback" button and tell them exactly what I think of their site. Guess what?!  The "Feedback" button only leads to one of those bogus web pages that contains absolutely nothing more than Google Adsense links. 

Extremely frustrated I visit the site designers web site, since a link was put at the bottom of the page of the site.  BAM! My browser was forcibly opened to its maximum size, which is one of my absolute major pet peeves! How dare a web site designer tell me how big my browser window should be, let alone forcibly reset my browser!

What pissed me off even more was that the design of the site did not need the full width of my browser, evidently the designer just likes the power of controlling my online experience.

But, alas…I think I have finally found what I was looking for!  Predominantly displayed on the front page of the site was a promo for a site redesign done back in June for….the NEW site for "Dekalb County Animal Service & Enforcement".  I’m on the edge of my seat with excitement as I get ready to click the link that was to take me to the site I originally was looking for….I hold my breath….low and behold, I get a site not found error! UGH!

I guess the next step is to see how well their phone system works… 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Rants, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.