The Society of Publishers in Asia
SOPA champions press freedom across Asia-Pacific and runs the region's most coveted journalism awards, but its website had fallen years behind the organisation. We redesigned it around membership and the SOPA Awards, and have run it since.
A redesigned WordPress platform that puts membership and the SOPA Awards front and centre, built and cared for by Chillybin across nearly a decade.
What we were solving
The Society of Publishers in Asia was founded in Hong Kong in 1982 to champion freedom of the press and set standards for publishers across Asia-Pacific. Its members range from global mastheads to local newsrooms. Its flagship event, the SOPA Awards for Editorial Excellence, has recognised the region's best journalism every year since 1999.
Chillybin had looked after SOPA's WordPress site on a care plan since 2017: weekly maintenance, awards-season page updates and member logo changes. By 2020 the site itself had become the problem. The board's brief was simple. People should be able to find information and register for events without digging for it. The team's own verdict was blunter (outdated).
Discovery sharpened that into specifics. The newly launched newsletter deserved a place on the homepage. The homepage features section forced staff to delete old posts by hand to surface new ones. And SOPA wanted a serious, credible presence with no glossy stock photography and no hard sell.
How we tackled it
Design for an institution, not a brand campaign
SOPA's reference points were organisations like the Online News Association and the Pulitzer Prizes, so the design leaned on clarity and restraint. A professional layout built around the mission statement, membership and the awards, with imagery kept sparse at the client's request. We took the homepage through three design revisions before moving to full visual designs, working with SOPA's new logo and creative direction so the site would sit alongside the planned refresh of the SOPA Awards presence.
Keep what works, fix what doesn't
SOPA asked for every page of existing content to be migrated, so we brought the full site across, preserving years of history, past winners and member information. WildApricot, which handles membership signup, was kept intact and wired into the new build. The manual features section was replaced with a homepage that surfaces news and the newsletter without staff pruning old posts by hand. The mailing list signup became the site's primary call to action.
Build it to be run, then keep running it
The site was built on WordPress with Beaver Builder on a Chillybin child theme, the stack we use where a small team needs to update content without a developer. Chillybin has hosted and maintained sopasia.com continuously since launch. In 2026 the site still runs on the build we shipped, still carries each year's awards cycle, still sits on our care plan.
What we delivered
SOPA now has a site that does what its board asked for: information and event registration that visitors can find, a homepage that leads with the mission, membership and the awards, and a newsletter signup positioned as the main action. Membership signup runs through the existing WildApricot integration, so joining SOPA works the way it always has, from a far better shop window.
The redesign launched in 2020 and is still SOPA's digital home six years on, across multiple awards cycles and board changes, with Chillybin handling hosting and maintenance throughout. Few association websites survive that long without a rebuild.
What we learned
Not-for-profits buy trust, not flash. SOPA's instruction to avoid "too many images" and happy stock photography ran against most design instincts, and it was right. For an organisation whose reputation rests on credibility, restraint is the brand. The decisions that mattered were structural (what leads the homepage, where the signup sits), not decorative.
The care plan is where association relationships are won. We'd maintained SOPA's previous site for years before the redesign conversation started, so discovery began from real knowledge of how the team worked and what broke.
We used Chillybin WordPress Web Design because of their previous customer testimonials, competitive pricing, good website and their prompt responses to our enquiries.
