If you visited the LEGO’s main website or the Online LEGO Shop in the past week or so, you may have noticed that they have gone through some significant changes. These changes have been gradually implemented over several weeks, and then finalized with changing the domain names as well. I have been following the development closely, so I thought I share some of the most significant changes I have seen so far.
The previous address of the main LEGO website was LEGO.com. This is where you would find information about the various LEGO themes as well as fun activities for kids. Once you clicked on a theme you were interested in (for example, LEGO Star Wars), you were taken to the dedicated micro-site of that theme (for our example that is LEGO.com/Themes/Star-Wars) with lots of information about that particular theme, along with pictures, videos, downloadable content, interviews with designers, back stories, alternate builds, fun activities for kids, and more. Every micro-site also had links to the Online LEGO Shop, so if you wanted to purchase a set you found at the main LEGO website, you were redirected to the Online LEGO Shop (for our example that is Shop.LEGO.com/Category/Star-Wars).
The Online LEGO Shop had its own separate dedicated website at Shop.LEGO.com. This is where you could purchase all the currently available LEGO sets, books, gift items, and more, And, if you are a LEGO VIP member, you could also look up information about your account, earn and redeem VIP points, track your orders, look at your order history, etc. With the recent changes, almost everything has been switched around, but don’t panic, with a little bit of poking and searching you should still be able to find most of the features of the old website.
Now, when you visit LEGO.com you are given two choices; SHOP, SUPPORT & MORE, which is basically the grown-ups section of the site, and the PLAY ZONE, which is the kids section of the site. In my experience, this choice is only shown the first time you visit LEGO.com, or when your session cookies expire, or when you use a different browser, or sometimes when you visit a section of the site you haven’t accessed before. Otherwise, the next time you visit LEGO.com, you will be taken to the site of your initial choice. But don’t worry, you can always switch over. If you originally selected the grown-ups zone (which is mostly the Online LEGO Shop), you can go over the PLAY ZONE by clicking on the blue KIDZ ZONE button at the top navigation bar. And, if you are in the PLAY ZONE, you can go over to the shop and other grown-up oriented sections of the site by clicking on the FOR GROWN-UPS link.
In simple terms this means that now LEGO.com accesses the Online LEGO Shop, and LEGO.com/Kids is the PLAY ZONE specifically targeting kids. At least to me as an adult, the PLAY ZONE looks like an unusable and un-navigable mess with an awful jumble of clickable tiles. It reminds me of the LEGO Life app, which looks and feels equally bewildering. But maybe that’s what kids like these days.
Thankfully, LEGO.com, which is now the Online LEGO Shop, is laid out in a lot more logical way, but there are changes here as well. Let’s start with the top navigation bar. The CHANGE REGION tab is where you can change your country. The ABOUT US tab give you access to the history of the LEGO Group, the Newsroom, the Media Library, links to annual financial reports, job listings, and more. All the serious stuff you would want to know about LEGO.
The VIP tab redirects you to the new LEGO VIP portal, which is now on a separate website at Rewards.LEGO.com. We talked about the changes to the LEGO VIP program extensively in previous articles (see links at the end of this post). The FIND A STORE tab lets you search for official LEGO stores by city, zip code, or country, and you can also view the current LEGO Store Calendar. The LEGO LIFE tab allows you to sign up your child to the LEGO Life Magazine, download the latest issue of the magazine as a PDF, and gives you information about the LEGO Life app.
Also in the top banner are your ACCOUNT INFO (where you can check your order status and look at your order history), your WISH LIST, and your SHOPPING CART.
How LEGO sets are organized in the new Online LEGO Shop is also different. The main tabs are THEMES, SHOP BY, INTERESTS, PROMOTIONS, EXCLUSIVES, SUPPORT, and SALE. I’m not going to walk you though all the tabs, as many of them are self-explanatory, but I will point out some of the major changes I found from the previous version of the site. If you are looking for a list of all the new sets, sets by age range, and sets by price, they are now under the SHOP BY tab. Books, storage solutions, watches, key-chains, apparel and accessories are also under the SHOP BY tab under PRODUCT TYPE. Another important section of the SHOP BY tab is BRICKS, which gives you access to the online LEGO Pick-A-Brick shop, baseplates, etc.
The INTERESTS tab basically just provides a different way to look for sets. The most important is the SEASONAL items sub-tab, as it doesn’t appear anywhere else. The PROMOTIONS tab shows you all the current freebies and other specials, SUPPORT gives you access to the robust Customer Service website (we talked about what’s here a few days ago – see links at the end of this post). The main selections here are contacting customer service, downloading building instructions, and accessing LEGO Bricks & Pieces for replacement parts and ordering loose LEGO elements. The SALES tab is an easy one; that’s where you find all the sets on sale!
An interesting new feature of the Online LEGO Shop is that the information that was previously available at the themes’ micro-sites are now integrated into the Online LEGO Shop. To stay with our example of LEGO Star Wars, when you select LEGO Star Wars from under the THEMES tab at the Online LEGO Shop, you will see all the currently available sets by default. But there is also a banner at the top of the page with a PRODUCTS and an ABOUT tab. If you click on ABOUT, you will be taken to what was formerly known as the LEGO Star Wars micro-site. This is where you will find designer-videos, interviews, alternate builds, fun and informational videos, info about the theme’s characters, and much more.
Another section that has been moved around is the building instructions for the MONTHLY MINI BUILDS. They are now accessible from the very bottom of any page of Shop.LEGO.com. There are some other links here that are worth exploring as well. Some are the same as what we found under the top navigation banners, but there are also links to the LEGO House, LEGOLAND Parks, LEGOLAND Discovery Centers, LEGO Education, LEGO Ideas, the LEGO Foundation, and LEGO’s social media channels.
And that concludes our short tour of the new LEGO.com website and related sites. Please note that if you are used to using shop.LEGO.com, or you have bookmarked/saved pages, most of them will automatically redirect to the new location of those pages. I do encourage you to look around based on the info I shared here, and also explore a little on your own. I find the new website significantly faster loading and better organized compared to the old site, except for the KIDS ZONE, which I can’t understand at all. It’s probably designed that way on purpose to keep grown-ups out…
What do you think? Have you had a chance to check out the new LEGO.com site and all the different parts of it? What do you like? What do you wish was different? Did you run into any trouble in navigating the site or finding what you were looking for? Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below!
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