via @AngusMaclane | Interview with Angus MacLane about CubeDudes | CubeDudes on Flickr

Sean Kenney is the guy I almost met at BrickWorld in 2009. Instead I had to settle for having my picture taken with Nathan Sawaya (read my recent interview with Nathan). Okay, not a great loss, but I’ve still got to catch up with Sean sooner or later. Sean is the other LEGO certified professional living in New York City. He’s also the guy who runs MOCpages — an online community for LEGO builders to share their creations, and is the author of Cool Cars and Trucks.

Cool Robots is Sean’s second LEGO building book in this series. It’s due to hit bookshelves in September, and I plan to snatch one up pretty quick. Well, two really. 1 for me, and 1 for my boys to fight over.

Though it leaves many of my questions unanswered, it does appear that this is more of a recent decision just announced, and will be several months before we see a final product. The site will apparently be redesigned by ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc.) and utilize the ATG Commerce platform to run the site.

via Brickset

Oh, and it wasn’t a requirement, but now that I see it’s there I’m twice as happy — I love the quotation marks setting off the Block Quotes. See, for example, on the Angus MacLane interview.

By the way, if you catch anything broken or not looking right — give me a holler, I’ll be tweaking some things for a few days to make sure everything is “just so.”

1. I’m into LEGO
2. I’ve felt for a while that LEGO needs to revamp their site (more about that below)
3. My day job is working on an eCommerce website.

There are several aspects of the LEGO site that may or may not be transparent to all consumers, but stand out to me as a webmaster. To their credit, these things are small, and not impossible, be improved on.

Where is it?

This is a key thing on any website. There are some things that are hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for. Or use search. Pick-a-brick is one. Building instructions are another. The cool LEGO club resources they have are another. About the only way I’ve been able to find some of the articles (like the write-ups on the LEGO certified professionals, for example) is search. And actually, that’s not always true. You get a lot of superfluous results sometimes. But I understand that problem; it takes a lot of care to check what people are searching for and figuring out what search results they’re looking for.

Timeliness of  updated articles

Maybe it’s just me (someone who would love to be a LEGO certified professional), but it seemed to take forever to get the number of LEGO certified professionals updated. There are 9 now. But up until a couple weeks ago, the site was only recognizing 6. And I’d already been hearing buzz for several months that more had been added, but hadn’t seen any confirmation.

AFOL-friendliness

The things that I’ve already mentioned are probably more along the lines of being AFOL-friendly, rather than friendly to the average consumer. There’s no denying the fact that it is an eCommerce site intended to sell stuff. And I think they do a decent job of that, but I definitely look forward to the improvements. On a side note, when I attended the LEGO Serious Play session at BrickWorld this past summer, the theme of the session was toward building a better LEGO online community that addressed and embraced all interested consumers whether child or adult.

When?

Launch date was not mentioned in the article. This leads me to wonder whether the project was just decided on, or is close to completion. On the one hand, you typically don’t want to show your hand to your competitors, on the other hand LEGO has been blowing away all forms of competition this past year and may be showing its customer-friendliness by readily admitting a need and letting us know as soon as possible that they’ve decided to address it.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled for further development. If anyone else catches any bits of news, please feel free to leave a comment.