In quiet Turner County, Georgia, pretty much every arm of the local government maintains a respectably boring web presence, but it seems the Sheriff's Office went a bit rogue with its tone-deaf Geocities-era design. It's like the city of Mayberry put Barney Fife in charge of its site!

For starters, the homepage is a mish-mash of tacky animated GIFs and clashing typefaces, which is exactly the kind of thing you want to see when you're just trying to figure out how to pay a traffic fine.

These Flash-animated letters will eventually arrange themselves to spell out "Click Here to Use a Credit Card to Post a Bond," if you'll just be patient.

Any suspicion that maybe the department just haven't gotten around to updating their website because they've been too busy eradicating all crime for the past 15 years is belied by the "Copyright ©2013" notice at the bottom of the page. The "latest news" features a Picasa slideshow of a firearms safety class from more than a year ago. Could that be our esteemed webmaster "Troy" in the second photo??

The "Unsolved Homicides" page is incredible. Apparently Troy took the title to mean "Unsolved Mysteries," so it was only appropriate to have the Unsolved Mysteries theme song start autoplaying. That mp3 is the only content on the page, because apparently there are no unsolved homicides. Also, the "WHO's IN JAIL?" page doesn't work. I'm starting to think there are no people in Turner County.

Well, there are at least a few Sheriff's Office employees in town, according to the awkward staff photos. Here's Captain Betty Lamb. Grrr! Maybe the reason she's so cranky-looking is that the department seems understaffed: The traffic division, patrol division and even the K-9 unit have one employee each. Why must Smoke carry so much burden?

Perhaps it's because employees are being replaced by robots. Check out "Deputy Do-Rite / Harry," a bizarre "robot" puppet that can seamlessly transition between generic furry monster and uniformed go-karter. I guess the Sheriff's Office blew its technology budget on terrifying schoolchildren instead of hiring a competent web designer.


– Adam "rubber cat" Jameson (@robbercat)

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