Starting from a finished file
Syndesus wasn’t a project that started with a blank page — it started with a finished one. Their team had already brought on a freelance designer and a marketing consultant to work out the brand, the messaging, and a complete Figma file before we ever got involved. The designer’s role stopped there; they don’t build websites, so Syndesus needed someone to take that file and turn it into a real, working site. Since we’d already been maintaining their previous site and had built the version before this one, we were a natural fit to carry it across the finish line.
Building someone else’s vision
Working from someone else’s design is a different kind of project, and honestly, a fun one. The Figma handoff was well done, which meant we could focus entirely on the build rather than any design decisions — every animated headline, every interactive panel, every layout choice was already decided, and our job was to make it real. That included a genuinely custom-coded site rather than something built entirely from off-the-shelf Elementor components; matching the designer’s intent meant writing a lot of custom code to get the functionality and feel right. The design was pixel-perfect on desktop, but tablet and mobile breakpoints weren’t part of the file, so we had latitude to make our own calls there and build out a responsive experience that stayed true to the desktop design’s spirit.
Filling in the gaps
Not every part of the site was fully specified, either. The blog and case study sections in particular hadn’t been fully thought through for UI and UX in the original design, so we made judgment calls on how those should behave and flow — the kind of decisions that come up naturally when a design file, however thorough, still has to become a living website. The trickiest piece of custom development on the whole project was the interactive slider on the Solutions page, where selecting a service updates the surrounding content and visuals in sync — simple to look at, considerably more involved to wire up correctly behind the scenes.
Where we plugged in
We handled the full CMS setup, the blog, and the form and CRM integrations ourselves. The one piece that lives outside the WordPress build is the job listings on the Current Opportunities page, which runs through an embedded iframe rather than being built natively into the site. Throughout the project, we worked primarily with the Syndesus team on reviews and approvals, looping in the original designer and marketing consultant only when a specific question came up about intent.
Plugging in wherever we’re needed
Projects like this are a good reminder that we don’t have to own a project end-to-end to do good work on it. Syndesus already had a designer and a strategist they trusted — what they needed was someone who could plug in at the development stage and execute cleanly. That’s a role we’re just as comfortable in as we are designing and building a site from scratch: sometimes the best way to help is to pick up exactly where someone else left off, and get it done right.