How Wollongong's Council Website Ended Up Full of Broken Images — and What's Being Done About It

Wollongong City Council's public-facing website is carrying hundreds of duplicate and broken image files — a problem that traces back through at least three separate content management system migrations since 2015, according to documents tabled at the council's ordinary meeting in June 2026. The digital housekeeping failure has affected everything from Crown Street Mall event pages to planning notices for the Port Kembla precinct.

The timing matters. Council is currently pushing to reposition Wollongong as a serious destination for green-industry investment, with the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone and BlueScope Steel's transition program both requiring coordinated public communications. A website that serves broken or duplicated images undermines the credibility of those campaigns, particularly when international investors and government partners are doing due diligence online before visiting Stewart Street in person.

How the problem accumulated

The immediate cause is straightforward: each time Council migrated platforms — moving from an older Squiz Matrix build to its current Drupal-based environment — image asset libraries were bulk-transferred without deduplication. The same photograph of the WIN Entertainment Centre foreshore, for example, exists in multiple folders under different filenames, while original source files from before the 2019 migration are stored on a deprecated server that still feeds some legacy pages. When that server experiences downtime, the images simply vanish from the live site, replaced by broken-link placeholders.

The University of Wollongong's Digital Media department flagged the issue formally in a submission to Council in March 2026, noting that broken imagery on local government sites correlates with reduced trust scores in community satisfaction surveys. The submission did not provide a figure specific to Wollongong but referenced national benchmarks from the Local Government Professionals Australia network. Council's own internal audit, completed in May 2026, identified approximately 1,400 image files flagged as either duplicates or orphaned assets — meaning they exist in the file system but are no longer referenced by any active page.

The audit also found that 214 pages within the Planning and Environment section of the website were pulling images from the deprecated server. Those pages include development application notices for sites in the Warrawong industrial corridor and the Fairy Meadow residential zone — documents that residents have a legal right to access in full, visuals included.

The fix, and what it will cost

Council resolved at its June meeting to allocate $48,000 from the 2026–27 digital infrastructure budget to a staged duplicate-image-replacement program. The first stage, due to conclude by September 30, 2026, covers all Planning and Environment pages. Stage two, targeting leisure and tourism content including the Wollongong Botanic Garden and North Beach precinct pages, is scheduled for completion before the summer events season in December.

The process involves a combination of automated deduplication scripts and manual review by Council's in-house web team, which currently has three full-time staff. Where original high-resolution images no longer exist — a common problem for content published before 2017 — new photographs will be commissioned, with local photographers able to register interest through Council's supplier portal on the councillors' intranet hub based at the civic administration building on Burelli Street.

For residents trying to access planning documents in the interim, Council's customer service centre on Kembla Street can provide printed or emailed copies of any DA notice where the online version is displaying broken images. The planning portal also allows users to submit a feedback flag directly on any affected page, which the web team is monitoring daily during the remediation period.

The broader lesson sits in the procurement decisions made in 2015 and again in 2019, when content migration was contracted without a mandatory deduplication audit as a deliverable. That oversight is now written into Council's updated Digital Governance Policy, adopted alongside the June budget resolution, which requires any future platform migration to include a signed-off asset audit before go-live sign-off is granted.