ICC Academy
ICC Academy trains trade finance professionals in 130+ countries for the organisation that wrote the Incoterms rules, but years of piecemeal updates had left its site a jumble of styles. We rebuilt the whole platform behind the ICC brand.
ICC Academy now has a WordPress platform that matches the parent ICC brand, organises its certification catalogue the way buyers search, and connects website, store and LMS in one journey.
What we were solving
ICC Academy is the e-learning arm of the International Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 45 million companies in over 170 countries. The ICC wrote the Incoterms rules and UCP 600, and the Academy turns that authority into online certifications for bankers, traders and corporates in more than 130 countries.
We had looked after the Academy's website for several years, so the problem was easy to name. Successive campaigns and course launches had each added their own page styles, until Shaan described the site to the client as a dog's dinner of different styles. It no longer looked like it belonged to the ICC, and a catalogue spanning trade finance, Incoterms, digital trade, arbitration and sustainability had become hard to shop.
In 2024 the Academy commissioned a full rebuild. Success was defined at the design strategy stage: match iccwbo.org visually, bring new leads in through SEO content hubs, make payment easy, and get returning learners back into their training without friction.
How we tackled it
Structure the catalogue around the buyer, not the archive
Before design, we rebuilt the information architecture. Every product moved into one hierarchy (topic, then product type, then product), so a banker looking for documentary credits training lands in trade finance, sees certifications, courses, bundles and eBooks side by side, and filters to the right one. A mega menu exposes the whole catalogue from any page, and Algolia search covers visitors who already know what they want. The restructure changed most URLs on a site with years of search equity, so we mapped old to new page by page in a 301 redirect plan.
A custom theme that matches the parent brand
We built a custom WordPress child theme on Bootstrap with Advanced Custom Fields, designed to sit alongside iccwbo.org rather than apart from it. Eleven custom post types give the marketing team structured control of every section, from news and events to alumni stories and FAQs, with Gravity Forms handling lead capture. The design went through structured revision rounds and a page-by-page QA pass on desktop and mobile with the ICC Academy team before launch on WP Engine.
One journey across website, ecommerce and LMS
An education business has three systems that usually feel like three websites: the marketing site, the store and the learning platform. The build connected all three, so a visitor moves from a content hub article to a course page to checkout to their learning dashboard without the site changing personality around them. In 2026 the Academy engaged us again to build GA4 and Google Tag Manager tracking across its Shopify store, with purchase attribution back to source and Consent Mode v2 for EU and UK visitors.
What we delivered
ICC Academy now has a platform that looks and behaves like part of the ICC. The catalogue is shoppable by topic, level and format, content hubs feed the sales funnel, and the marketing team manages the whole site themselves through WordPress. Two years on, the site is live and still on the build we shipped, with new alumni stories publishing this month, and the engagement has grown into measurement work on the commerce side.
What we learned
Honesty is a service. Calling a client's site a dog's dinner is a risk, but Will quoted the line back with affection because it named the real problem: years of decisions made one campaign at a time with nothing holding them together. The fix is an information architecture project in a design project's clothes, never a reskin.
Big catalogues live or die on taxonomy. The most valuable work on this build is invisible in screenshots: topic outranks product type, and every URL says what it is. Get that layer right and the menu, filters and redirects follow.
We are extremely pleased with the final result which has brought our online presence fully in line with our parent organisation’s brand, one of the key objectives.
