apipartners.com
- Released
- 2026
- Role
- Front end
- Client
- API Partners
- Type
- Front end
API Partners places leadership at architecture, engineering and construction firms — SOM, HKS, Perkins&Will, Leo A Daly are on the testimonial wall. They have been doing it since 1995. I built the front end: markup, styles and behaviour, handed over for the CMS integration.
The brief
A recruiting firm for the built environment is judged by the people it places: principals and partners who look at buildings for a living. Anything that reads as a template loses the argument before the copy does any work. Type, spacing and restraint had to carry it.
The second constraint was that I was not the one wiring it into WordPress. Everything had to survive being cut into templates by someone else — sections that stand on their own, class names that mean what they say, and no behaviour that depends on the exact order of the markup.
What I built
Front end only: five page templates — home, about, expertise, opportunities, contact — as static markup with SCSS and vanilla ES modules on a Gulp pipeline, then handed over for integration.
Every section initialises itself and rebuilds after a resize, so the same block behaves the same whether it lands on one page or four. The heavy parts — sliders, smooth scrolling, scroll-linked motion — wait for the first real interaction instead of running at load. That is the difference between a page that paints immediately and one that spends its first second on JavaScript nobody has asked for yet.
Services that open in place
The expertise list is an accordion of numbered services — one open, the rest collapsed to a line. It puts three long service descriptions on one screen without asking anyone to scroll past the two they did not come for.
A focus row that becomes a slider
Five industry cards sit in a row on desktop and turn into a centred slider below it — rebuilt on resize rather than duplicated in the markup. One set of cards, two behaviours, one thing to maintain.
An opportunities board that pages
Active searches are cards with a location tag and pagination, so the list can grow to whatever the firm currently has open without the page growing with it.
Nothing runs until you touch it
Smooth scrolling, sliders and scroll-linked motion all initialise on the first mousemove, wheel or touch. Load is markup and CSS; the rest arrives when there is someone there to see it.
