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

Wollongong City Council's public-facing website is carrying hundreds of duplicate and broken image placeholders across its planning, community services and events pages — a legacy problem that staff are now working through methodically after a digital audit completed in the first half of 2026 put a number to the mess for the first time.

The issue matters now because the council is in the middle of a broader digital transformation push, partly tied to its obligations under the NSW Government's Local Government Digital Strategy and partly driven by community feedback gathered during the 2025 Crown Street Mall precinct consultation. Residents trying to navigate development applications, event listings and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund grant portal have repeatedly encountered grey boxes where photographs or maps should be. For a council actively promoting itself as a gateway to investment in Port Kembla's renewable energy transition, the optics are not helpful.

How the Problem Built Up Over a Decade

The roots of the duplicate-image problem go back to at least two major content management system migrations — one around 2014 and a second in 2019 — when thousands of pages were transferred across platforms without a consistent image-path protocol. Each migration copied file references without always copying the files themselves, or copied files into new directories while leaving old references pointing at locations that no longer existed. Staff turnover in the council's communications and digital teams across that period meant institutional knowledge about which images lived where was largely lost.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility, based on the Innovation Campus on Squires Way in North Wollongong, has documented similar problems in public-sector digital archives across regional NSW, noting that smaller councils and departments rarely have the dedicated content governance resources to manage image libraries during platform changes. The council's situation is not unusual for a mid-sized local government, but the scale became more visible as mobile traffic to the council's site grew — broken images load differently on phones than on desktop browsers, making the gaps harder to ignore.

A further complication is duplication rather than simple absence. In some cases the same image was uploaded multiple times under different filenames across different page builds, consuming server storage and making search and replacement more labour-intensive. The council's current content management system, in use since the 2019 migration, does not automatically flag duplicate assets.

The Audit and What Comes Next

The audit completed this year identified more than 400 individual page sections carrying either a broken image reference or a duplicate asset flagged for rationalisation, according to a council tender notice published on the NSW eTendering portal in May 2026. The council put a services contract to market seeking a digital content agency to assist with the remediation work, with a stated budget envelope of up to $85,000. The tender closed on 20 June.

The remediation work is expected to proceed in three stages: first, replacing or removing broken references on high-traffic pages including the development applications portal and the Destination Wollongong events calendar; second, deduplicating the image library and establishing a naming convention; and third, documenting a governance framework to prevent recurrence during future platform updates. The council has flagged completion of stage one by the end of the 2026 calendar year.

For residents and businesses using the council's website — whether to track a DA for a property on Keira Street, check community facility bookings at the Corrimal Community Centre, or access Port Kembla precinct planning documents — the practical advice is straightforward: if a page displays a broken image or missing map, the underlying document is usually still accessible via the search function or by contacting the relevant council directorate directly. The content exists; the visual layer pointing to it has simply broken down over time.

The broader lesson, if the council's own post-audit notes are any guide, is that digital maintenance is recurrent infrastructure cost, not a one-off project. Wollongong spent years treating it as the latter. The $85,000 contract is, in effect, the bill for that choice.