KNI spent the better part of ’08 working on a complete redesign and re-engineering of the Hyundaiusa.com website. Near the end of the project, the agency who’d retained us, GSP, actually parted ways with their client, Hyundai, leaving the fate of the project hanging in the balance. We had everything at around 90% complete, when we handed over all code and assets to Hyundai, unsure what fate would ever befall all the work we’d done. We’d check the URL periodically, curious to see if anything would ever launch. Then, about 6 or 7 months later, most of us ceased checking it and pretty much gave up hope that anything would ever launch, or at least anything that bore even a remote resemblance to what we’d worked on.
To our utter surprise, nearly a year later, in December of 09, a semblance of the code and the layouts we handed over finally launched! Many things changed, of course, and the launch was not without a significant amount of visual and functional degradation. It was a fairly typical case of Frankencode and Frankenlayout that often seems inevitable when one group hands off a project to another. Many of these degradations were naturally a disappointment to us. That said, it’s nice to see SOMETHING finally come out of all the work we put into the project.
View a video of the “before”.
