How iCrossing Redesigned Hyundai's Web Site
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, January 11, 2010
Hyundai officially unveiled a Web site Monday with help from digital-marketing firm iCrossing.
iCrossing worked with Hyundai's marketing and IT departments to design and build the new Web site, which highlights the automaker's cars and services. The redesign meant mapping out the site and redirecting and moving about 1,600 Web site pages.
Along with Hyundai Information Service North America (HISNA), iCrossing developed criteria and business objects before building the site. An important consideration was the number of clicks required to reach information consumers might need to make buying decisions. The goal was to provide simple navigation that allows consumers to explore all the creative elements on the site.
The group built the site on a Microsoft .NET architecture, and coded Flash, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and .NET pages on Hyundai.com to provide consumers with an interactive experience.
Supporting video content and three-dimensional (3D) graphics, iCrossing relied on a proprietary framework to optimize performance through tags and headers, made sure that search engine crawlers could find and index all pieces on the site, and incorporated the Interwoven Content Management System for easier site updates. The content management system supports copy and graphics.
About 200 templates support the project. The templates allowed iCrossing to create similar pages to reduce the cost and burden of maintenance because changes were only made once. "There are about 200-and-some-odd templates, but there are between 1,500 and 1,600 pages on the Web site," says Dom Vieira, iCrossing vice president of automotive. "Rather than make 1,500 changes, we would only make 200 changes to correct the word 'copyright,' for example."
And while automakers like Hyundai, Kia, Toyota and Mazda are hiring iCrossing to support Web efforts, the largest independent digital-marketing firm has hired an investment bank to hold talks with possible suitors, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in late December, citing several people familiar with the matter.
Evidently, iCrossing hired Bank of America after receiving an unsolicited bid from newspaper and magazine publisher Hearst. The WSJ says iCrossing's board considered the offer too low and decided to solicit other potential buyers. The company is backed by Goldman Sachs Group and venture capital firm Oak Investment Partners.
It's great to see an automobile company come to understand that a visually compelling and interactive website can also be search engine friendly. Now, if they would just allow consumers to add comments and reviews of their cars!
Wow.... 200+ Templates... Why even have a CMS?
I think my very favorite part of this article is this quote: "There are about 200-and-some-odd templates, but there are between 1,500 and 1,600 pages on the Web site," says Dom Vieira, iCrossing vice president of automotive. "Rather than make 1,500 changes, we would only make 200 changes to correct the word 'copyright,' for example."
A new template for every eight pages? And, 200 Changes for the copyright as opposed to 1,500? I mean I guess that really is an 85% decrease... But maybe they'd like to consider the concept of "include file". Or, maybe a separate template for the footer... Just sayin...
wow, i'm shocked to read that iCrossing is claiming that they designed this site when, in fact, they had little to do with the conceptualizing, pitching, and design of it.
A ton of talented professionals at a great SF agency did all the conceptualizing and most of the design work while other small SF shops did initial builds of the components and main pages of the site before the job was stopped and later iCrossing finished implementation of the design into the "200 and some odd" templates.
These folks (not iCrossing) spent nearly a solid year of working directly with Hyundai marketing, selling them on a whole new site philosophy and online band image, introducing really great new ideas - many of which were unfortunately taken out of iCrossing's final build of the site.
iCrossing was there to offer their back-end expertise and give advice where it would make implementation easier. They did not develop the endless number of design iterations, finesse the final look and feel, user test, develop copy, create information strategies, become experts in hyndai's products, design wireframes, mock-ups, prototypes... etc. you know the story.
it's a shame to see, but not surprising, that a company of iCrossing's stature would not have the maturity to give props to the great design and agency professionals who actually made the design happen but, to claim they did it all is pretty outrageous.
@Capraro: The folks who do the real work and the real dev rarely get the credit. The big kids have PR firms to make sure articles like this get published. Shameless Plug: in 1999 my partner and I developed a site called MyWitnessNews.com (I still own the URL) that allowed users to upload raw video, converted it on the fly to streaming media, allowed you to put it in catagories (like "Animals", "Home Movies", etc.) and then let viewers rate each clip. Does this sound familiar? Ever hear of us before? Thought not.
Truth committee just found this interesting blog post.
http://blog.kurtnoble.com/post/283495413/hyundaiusa
This post sheds some reality on this pretty farcical press release. I've heard, from some other sources, too, that iCrossing was really just a project management layer on this project and that the balance of the their role was largely relegated to "bloat n' bill" responsibilities.
Getting harder and harder to blow snow around these days. Just so much truth out there to try and cover up.