How Wollongong's Council Website Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — And What It's Doing About It

The City of Wollongong's corporate website is carrying hundreds of duplicate images across its pages — the result of more than a decade of piecemeal content uploads, two major content management system migrations, and no consistent digital asset policy until recently. The council's communications team confirmed a structured audit and replacement program is currently in progress, though the work began quietly and without fanfare.

The timing matters. Wollongong is in the middle of an aggressive pitch to position itself as a serious destination for investment — from BlueScope Steel's green steel transition at Port Kembla to the push to grow the innovation economy around the University of Wollongong's campus on Northfields Avenue. A cluttered, visually inconsistent web presence undercuts that pitch in practical terms: slow page loads, broken alt-text, and stock photography recycled across unrelated services pages send a signal that digital administration is not a priority.

How the Duplication Built Up Over Time

The problem did not arrive all at once. It compounded across roughly three phases. Between 2010 and 2016, individual council departments managed their own web content with minimal central oversight, regularly re-uploading the same images of Crown Street Mall, Belmore Basin or the Nan Tien Temple whenever a staff member couldn't locate the original file in the system. The first CMS migration, completed around 2017, imported legacy content wholesale rather than auditing it, meaning duplicates were baked into the new architecture from day one.

A second migration — to the current platform — carried the same problem forward. By the time a formal digital governance framework was adopted, the image library had grown unwieldy. Multiple versions of the same photograph of WIN Stadium, for instance, existed under different filenames, uploaded at different compression levels, assigned to different service categories.

This is not unique to Wollongong. Councils across NSW have grappled with identical issues as web teams expanded during the pandemic years and then contracted. The NSW Government's Digital.NSW unit published guidance on digital asset management for local government in 2023, but implementation across the 128 councils in the state has been uneven at best.

The Audit and What Comes Next

The current replacement program works in stages. The first phase focused on the council's homepage and key landing pages — sections covering planning, development applications and community services, which collectively draw the highest traffic. Those pages have been cleared of duplicate files and brought into alignment with the council's refreshed brand guidelines, which set new specifications for image dimensions, file naming conventions and accessibility metadata including alt-text.

Phase two, running through the second half of 2026, is targeting the deeper service directories: the pages covering Wollongong Botanic Garden, the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre on Burelli Street, and the network of library branches including the central branch on Crown Street. Staff have been trained on the new digital asset management system, which flags potential duplicates before upload rather than after.

The practical downstream effect for residents is modest but real. Faster-loading pages on mobile connections — important for the city's outer suburbs including Dapto and Shellharbour Road corridor communities where fixed broadband penetration remains lower — and improved accessibility for screen-reader users. The council's digital team has also committed to ensuring that imagery reflects the actual demographic diversity of the Illawarra region, replacing stock photography sourced from generic Australian image libraries with locally commissioned photography where budget allows.

The broader lesson is administrative rather than technical. Digital asset governance is not a one-time fix. It requires the same kind of ongoing maintenance that a physical asset register demands — a point that the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation of Councils has been pushing in its regional digital capacity building work. Wollongong's program, however unglamorous, is the kind of infrastructure work that makes everything else function. Residents who use the council website to track development applications on Keira Street or book a pavilion at Stuart Park will eventually notice the difference, even if they never know why the pages got faster.