ICC Academy
ICC Academy trains trade finance professionals in 130+ countries for the organisation that wrote the Incoterms rules. Years of piecemeal updates had left its sales site a jumble of styles, so we rebuilt the whole platform (catalogue, content hubs, ecommerce and LMS access) behind the ICC brand.
A ground-up redesign of ICC Academy's WordPress platform that brought the site in line with the parent ICC brand, organised a sprawling certification catalogue by how buyers actually search, and connected website, ecommerce and LMS into one journey.
What we were solving
ICC Academy is the e-learning arm of the International Chamber of Commerce, the institutional representative of more than 45 million companies in over 170 countries. This is the organisation that created the Incoterms rules and UCP 600, and the Academy turns that standard-setting authority into online certifications (the Certified Trade Finance Professional, the Certified Documentary Credits Expert, the Incoterms 2020 Certificate in five languages) for bankers, traders and corporates in more than 130 countries.
Chillybin had looked after the Academy's website for several years before this project. That long view made the problem easy to name: successive campaigns and course launches had each added their own page styles and templates, until Shaan described the site to the client (candidly) as a dog's dinner of different styles. It no longer looked like it belonged to the ICC, and the disorder had a commercial cost. The site's core job is to sell courses, and a catalogue spanning trade finance, Incoterms, international trade, digital trade, arbitration and sustainability had become genuinely hard to shop.
In 2024 the Academy commissioned a full rebuild. Success had a clear definition set at the design strategy stage: bring the site visually in line with iccwbo.org, bring new leads in through SEO content hubs, make it obvious who the Academy is and what it offers, 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 a consistent 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 can filter to the right one. The brief involved heavy categorisation across custom taxonomies, with filtering and related-content links designed to keep visitors exploring rather than bouncing. A dynamic mega menu exposes the whole catalogue from any page, and Algolia search covers visitors who arrive knowing exactly which certification they want.
Because the restructure changed most URLs on a site with years of accumulated search equity, we mapped the old structure to the new one page by page in a 301 redirect plan, so rankings and bookmarks survived the move.
A custom theme that matches the parent brand
We built a custom, responsive WordPress child theme on the Bootstrap framework with Advanced Custom Fields, designed to sit visually alongside iccwbo.org rather than apart from it. Eleven custom post types (news, team, events, clients, careers, partners, testimonials, resources, podcast, alumni and FAQs) give the marketing team structured control of every section, with Gravity Forms handling lead capture and training enquiries. 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 hosting.
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. A stated goal of the build was optimised integration between all three, so a visitor can move from a content hub article to a course page to checkout to their learning dashboard without the site changing personality around them. The relationship has continued in the same direction: in 2026 the Academy engaged us again to build GA4 and Google Tag Manager tracking across its Shopify store, with ecommerce events, purchase attribution back to source and Consent Mode v2 for EU and UK visitors, including the custom eligibility-gated add-to-cart flows on its highest-value certifications.
What we delivered
The 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, current and still on the build we shipped, with new alumni stories publishing as recently as this month, and the engagement has grown into measurement work on the commerce side.
What we learned
Honesty is a service. Telling a client their site is a dog's dinner is a risk, but Will's testimonial quotes the line back with affection because it named the real problem: not one bad page, but years of decisions made one campaign at a time with no system holding them together. The fix for that is never a reskin. It is an information architecture project wearing a design project's clothes.
Big catalogues live or die on taxonomy. The most valuable work on this build is invisible in screenshots: deciding that topic outranks product type, that a course bundle is a type and not a topic, and that every product URL should say what it is. Get that layer right and the mega menu, the filters, the related-content modules and the redirects all fall out of it naturally.
And a rebuild is a chapter, not the book. Chillybin looked after this site for years before the redesign and is still building on it two years later. The 2026 tracking work exists because the platform earned the right to the next question: now that it sells well, how precisely can we measure what sells?
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.
