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NSW Rural Fire Service

Auditing Nearly 3,000 Pages to Build a Fire-Ready Website

NSW Rural Fire Service

OVERVIEW

Deepend audited an inflated, decade-old website to provide NSW Rural Fire Service with an evidence-based content strategy and authoring migration-ready content ahead of a hard fire-season deadline.

CLIENT
NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS)

INDUSTRY
Government, Emergency Services, Public Safety

SERVICES
Content Strategy, Content Audit, Content Authoring, Analytics

YEAR
2026

The Challenge

The RFS website hadn't been redesigned in ten years. Content had grown organically over that decade: information was contradictory across pages, buried in PDFs, and hard to find. Testing of the site's information architecture across 11 critical tasks with 53 participants, returned a task success rate of just 33%, and 31% of Hotjar respondents said they'd failed to achieve their goal on the site. More than half of all user feedback centred on a single page, the site's most visited. RFS was moving to a full platform rebuild on Squiz's Digital Experience Platform, with a hard deadline to be live ahead of the next fire season.

The Opportunity

A platform rebuild gave NSW RFS a rare opportunity to remedy a decade's worth of content debt in one move, provided that content decisions were made on evidence rather than guesswork.

Operationally, getting this right equated to a leaner, more managable site for RFS that stands up to legislative and operational scrutiny.

For the public, this improved content significantly; providing up-to-date, human and machine optimised content to help the community find potentially life-saving information in a timely manner.

Mobile phone resting on a wooden park bench in a park, with the RFS NSW webpage open on the screen.
Screenshot of the spreadsheet used to audit the 2,913 webpages across the existing RFS NSW website.

Our Approach

Deepend structured the engagement as two deliberately separate phases: a Discovery, Audit and Content Strategy phase to decide what should be produced; followed by a Content Authoring and Reauthoring phase to produce it.

This approach meant RFS committed to full-scale content production once the plan was evidence-based, costed, and approved.

Data visualisations of insights formed through the RFS NSW content strategy research phase
Content Strategy

Our content strategy research delivered an audit of almost 3,000 webpages across 7 site sections, audience insights, user needs, content principles, a content action framework, content migration roadmap and more.
Data visualisation of key audiences and needs identified in the content strategy phase
A photograph of a NSW Rural Fire Service fireman

What we delivered

Analytics and voice-of-customer research
Interviews
Content inventory, audit and alignment
Clipboard Checklist
Content creation and migration strategy
Tracking1
Content authoring and editorial QA
Content Authoring

Impact

Fully comprehensive audit

2,913 website content pages audited within a 3–4 week discovery phase.

Significant reduction in site density

69% of existing content (2,024 pages) was recommended for retirement or consolidation, cutting site complexity considerably.

Working smarter, not harder

Top 10 pages alone carried roughly 75% of all site traffic, rising to 95% across the top 50, sharpening exactly where prioritisation effort landed.

Content prioritisation matrix

50 highest-priority pages given detailed, page-level content recommendations.

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Related Work

NSW Rural Fire Service Content Strategy FAQs

Why did the content need such an extensive audit before the rebuild?

The RFS site had grown for a decade without a full review, so information had become duplicated, outdated or hard to find. Auditing all 2,913 pages meant every content decision going into the new site was based on evidence, not guesswork, which mattered given the site's role in community safety.

How did you decide what content to keep, rewrite or remove?

We built a scoring framework with RFS stakeholders that weighted five factors: legislative requirements, community safety, operational need, content accuracy, and page popularity. Every page was scored against this framework and against real user data from analytics and user testing, so the plan reflected what people actually needed from the site.

What role did user research play in the strategy?

A significant one. The existing site's information architecture was tested with 53 participants across 11 common tasks, and we reviewed around 1,250 pieces of user feedback from Hotjar. This surfaced specific gaps, like missing evacuation guidance, that a content audit alone wouldn't have caught.

How did you manage a project this size within a fixed deadline?

We split the work into two phases: deciding what should be produced, then producing it. This meant RFS only committed to full content production once the plan was evidence based, costed and approved, which kept the programme accountable and on track for the fire season deadline.

How did the content strategy account for the conditions people might actually be in during an emergency?

The content principles were built around real world use, not just best practice. Content needed to be written in plain language rather than internal jargon, structured for fast scanning on a mobile screen, and lightweight enough to load in a low bandwidth regional area or when local networks are under strain during a fire. The goal was content that still works when someone is stressed, on the move, and relying on a patchy connection.