Wollongong Council's Website Overhaul Hits Snag Over Duplicate Image Replacement

Wollongong City Council's months-long effort to replace duplicate and low-resolution images across its digital platforms stalled this week after staff identified hundreds of redundant files embedded in legacy pages that predate the council's 2023 content management system migration. The hold-up has delayed the relaunch of at least three public-facing service pages, including the Crown Street Mall precinct guide and the Port Kembla community information hub.

The timing is awkward. Council is midway through a broader digital accessibility push tied to the NSW Government's Digital Restart Fund commitments, which require participating councils to meet updated web content accessibility guidelines by December 2026. Duplicate imagery — particularly images without proper alt-text descriptions — counts against compliance scores. With five months left on the clock, the backlog matters.

What the Audit Found

An internal content audit completed in late June flagged more than 340 image instances across council's main domain where the same photograph appeared under different file names, creating confusion for screen readers and inflating page-load times on mobile devices. Several of the duplicates trace back to a 2019 promotional campaign for the Flagstaff Hill precinct in Nowra, imagery that was redistributed without consistent naming conventions across multiple Illawarra Shoalhaven regional development pages.

The University of Wollongong's digital communications team, which manages its own parallel web estate, ran a similar deduplication exercise in February this year. That project, handled internally by the university's marketing and communications division, resolved roughly 500 duplicate assets across UOW's faculties portal and took approximately six weeks. Council's situation is more complex: its image library spans planning documents, heritage registers, event archives and the BeachSafe coastal access guides covering beaches from Stanwell Park to Windang.

The practical consequence for residents is limited but real. Search results for local landmarks — Nan Tien Temple, the Glasshouse Rocks walking trail near Kiama, the Steel Mile heritage walk through Port Kembla — can return inconsistent thumbnail images depending on which cached version a search engine has indexed. For tourism operators along the Illawarra Escarpment, that kind of visual inconsistency can undermine the work done by Destination Wollongong to present a coherent brand.

Cost and Next Steps

Council put the remediation work out to a local digital services provider earlier this year. The contract, listed on the NSW eTendering portal in March 2026, was valued at under $50,000 — below the threshold requiring a full tender process — and awarded to a Wollongong CBD-based firm. Work was originally scheduled for completion by the end of June. The revised timeline now points to late August, according to a project update tabled at the council's June 30 ordinary meeting agenda, which is publicly available on the council website.

The delay also affects the refresh of the Wollongong Art Gallery's digital collection pages on council's domain, where duplicate images of works in the permanent collection have caused cataloguing mismatches. Gallery staff flagged the issue separately to council's ICT team in May.

For residents and local businesses wondering what happens next: the Crown Street Mall precinct guide will go live in its updated form once the image replacement is signed off, likely before the end of August. The Port Kembla community hub page, which carries information about the renewable energy zone project and BlueScope's green steel transition consultation schedule, is being prioritised given community interest. Council's digital team has asked content owners across departments to audit their own section pages and flag remaining duplicate files by July 18. Anyone who uses council's online development application tracker or the Wollongong2050 community engagement portal should not notice any disruption during the remediation period, as those systems sit on a separate infrastructure stack.

It is not glamorous work. But with digital accessibility compliance deadlines looming and the region's major industrial and environmental transition projects relying on clear public communications channels, getting the basics right has become more consequential than it might appear.