Quick summary
City of Kwinana is a growing local government area in south Perth with a sprawling website that was becoming impossible to manage manually. With limited resources and compliance requirements to meet, they needed a way to prioritize accessibility fixes across hundreds of pages. Silktide helped them spot problems instantly, focus on high-impact pages, and even solve unexpected technical challenges.
About City of Kwinana
City of Kwinana sits in the southern Perth metro area and serves a diverse community of young families and older residents. As a growth council, they’re somewhere in the middle size-wise but manage multiple facilities including recreation centers, youth programs, and community events. Their small but busy Marketing and Communications team handles everything from social media to website management, often working reactively to keep up with demand.
The challenge
Dylan Weston, Digital Communications Officer, inherited a website with hundreds of pages and no clear way to prioritize what needed fixing. With multiple “website champions” across different departments making edits, consistency was a constant battle.
“The team don’t have time to just go through every page manually and look for spelling errors,” Dylan explains. The team was drowning in content that varied wildly in style and technical complexity, which is less than ideal when the team’s priority is to write accessible content at an 8th-grade reading level. Preparing content in this fashion ensures it’s easily understood by all members of the Kwinana community.
As a local government, they also had accessibility compliance requirements, but Dylan admits he didn’t have a background in accessibility: “It’s made it quite straightforward.”
The solution
Silktide became their content triage system. Rather than randomly fixing issues, alongside his colleague, part-time editor Fairuz, Dylan could cross-reference analytics traffic data with Silktide’s problem identification to tackle high-impact pages first.
“We’ll look at where a lot of the traffic is headed, then cross-reference that with Silktide and be like: a lot of people are using this page, it’s also got a lot of problems – it’s a high priority for us.”
But Dylan discovered Silktide could do more than just spot accessibility issues. Faced with an impending third-party software migration, Dylan didn’t panic; he built a custom check to hunt down instances of what were soon to be redundant links across the website. At that time, this was not something that couldn’t natively be done in the City’s CMS. What could’ve taken hours of manual digging took just minutes instead.
The outcome
Over just five months, the team saw measurable improvements across the board, with many areas, including content, accessibility, and user experience jumping 10–20 percentage points. But even more importantly, they finally felt in control. Instead of reacting to scattered issues, they could focus their energy where it made the biggest impact.
The custom policies feature proved particularly valuable for solving one-off technical challenges that would have otherwise required expensive developer time or manual detective work across hundreds of pages.
What’s next?
The team is planning a website update. Dylan’s advice to other councils considering Silktide? “Access the resources available to you just because you get so much more value out of Silktide. If I hadn’t really spoken to [customer success] or taken any time out of my day to watch some tutorials, I’d probably just be plodding along and not really have made any significant progress.”