Asia Internet Coalition
The Asia Internet Coalition speaks for the world's largest internet companies on policy across Asia Pacific. We designed and built the WordPress platform that turns its years of policy submissions into a filterable library, and have hosted it since.
A WordPress build that organised hundreds of policy submissions, statements and reports into a library filterable by country, topic and document type, still running four years after launch.
What we were solving
The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) is the industry association for the internet economy in Asia Pacific. Founded in 2010 and run from Singapore, it represents the major global internet and technology companies in policy conversations with governments across the region, from data protection in Vietnam to digital tax in Pakistan.
An association like this produces documents: policy submissions, statements, press releases and commissioned reports, published continuously across 19 markets plus the G20. That archive is the association's institutional memory and its public evidence of work done. On the old site it was hard to find.
A regulator's staffer checking AIC's position before a consultation closes, or a journalist on deadline, won't page through a chronological news feed to find a two-year-old submission on data localisation.
AIC engaged Chillybin in mid 2022. Success meant any visitor finding AIC's position on any issue, in any market, within a few clicks, on a site the secretariat could publish to without a developer.
How we tackled it
Design around the documents, not the brochure
The scoped design work was narrow: two page designs, the homepage and the policy library. Most association sites treat the archive as an afterthought behind the mission statement; here the library was the product, with search and filtering designed in from the first wireframe. Underneath it we modelled the association's output as structured content: members, team, workstreams, policies, reports and media (press releases, statements and webinars), plus a blog. Every document type carries the same classification, which is what makes the filtering work.
Built to be filtered
The build runs on WordPress with Beaver Builder and a custom child theme. Search & Filter Pro lets visitors cut the archive three ways at once: by resource type (submissions, press releases, reports, statements), by policy area (15 categories) and by country (19 markets plus the G20). PDFs are served through a managed downloads system rather than loose media files, so documents stay organised as the library grows.
Accessible by scope, delivered in nine weeks
Design and development were scoped to WCAG guidelines from kickoff. A body that lobbies governments on an open and inclusive internet has to clear that bar on its own front door. Gravity Forms handles enquiries, and Perfmatters with server-side caching keeps a document-heavy site quick. Delivery ran on a nine-week timeline, and the site moved onto Chillybin hosting and a Website Care plan at launch.
What we delivered
AIC now publishes submissions, statements and reports to the same site we built four years ago (same theme, same framework, same library). Documents span September 2018 to mid 2025 across every market AIC works in, and each new one slots into the country and topic filters automatically. The secretariat does it without touching a developer. The website has kept pace with the advocacy, on nothing more than a standard care plan.
What we learned
For an industry association, the website is the archive. The temptation is to spend the design budget on the mission pages, but AIC's credibility lives in the hundreds of documents that prove the work. Getting the taxonomy right (type, topic and country as independent filters) was the real design decision; the visual layer just had to stay out of its way.
Longevity is an outcome too. Nothing on this project was exotic (a mainstream framework, proven plugins, a content model that anticipated growth), and that is why it has lasted.
