The visual design of municipal websites contributes to their usability and user experience and shapes citizens’ first impressions of local governments. Visual complexity and colorfulness are two central dimensions of visual design. This study compares these dimensions across the homepages of 100 Chinese and 100 Western municipal websites. The findings show that Chinese websites are more visually complex and more colorful than Western websites. Regarding visual complexity, Chinese websites displayed more diversity and density of visual elements, less structured text organization, and more content blocks. Regarding colorfulness, they had more colors, higher saturation and brightness, and a stronger preference for red as a dominant color. Overall, the results suggest that visual design conventions in municipal websites are closely tied to linguistic, artistic, and pragmatic factors, highlighting the value of cross-cultural analysis in website design.