Toysandbricks.com - Brand New Website

[Ice]

Toysandbricks.com is now officially live! The creation of this site is due to the main site being too overcrowded with sales posts. To maintain consistency and to let people know that the new site is part of Toys N Bricks, the website format and style will be exactly the same as Toysnbricks.com.

Please do read the following as there will be minor changes to the LEGO news we report on both sites.

Toysandbricks.com will have an extensive coverage on
•New & Upcoming Sets
•LEGO Reviews, Cool Creations
•LEGO Events, Shows, Video Games
•Site News

Toysnbricks.com will have an extensive coverage on
•LEGO Sales & Deals
•LEGO Availability
•LEGO Store Calendar
•Site News

LEGO Forums (1)

Our LEGO Forums will remain unchanged and will continue to be available at Toysnbricks.com/forums. Traffic support to the forums will be provided by both sites.

Flickr/Twitter (1)

With the exception of FaceBook, our third party sites at Flickr and Twitter will be used by both Toysandbricks.com and Toysnbricks.com. This means we will not have 2 different groups for Flickr and Twitter, but only 1 group. Twitter followers will receive news from both sites.

FaceBook (2)

There will be 2 different FaceBook Fan Groups. Toysandbricks.com FaceBook will focus on LEGO News while Toysnbricks.com FaceBook will focus on LEGO Sales & Deals. Become a fan on both groups to get news from both sites!

e-Newsletter (1)

Our LEGO e-Newsletter will remain unchanged and will continue to provide news in all areas.

We hope that we can provide a better experience for you with these changes. I would also like to take the time to thank the staff and forum members who participated in the beta testing period. Your feedback and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Couldn't have made the site without you! There's been some really good suggestions and future plans may include 2 Sales & Deals site (ex Toysnbricks.com for North America and Toysnbricks.net for Europe/Asia). If the LEGO News and Sales & Deals split is sucessful, the Sales & Deals split will not be too far behind!

*To ensure a smooth and successful transition for all of our visitors and members, Toysnbricks.com will continue to report a limited amount of LEGO news until July. It will however, eventually transition to a site that only reports LEGO Sales & Deals.

[aaronptrck]

Thanks so much for all the hard work guys... Toys N' Bricks is a great resource that I visit again and again! Over the past year I've saved SO much money on my favorite toys thanks to the constantly updated sales and deals notifications. Keep up the good work!

[hmillington]

I'm a little unclear as to why you've created two identical sites. Surely all it will do is create confusion for your visitors and fragment your traffic. The casual visitor isn't going to notice the difference between 'n' and 'and' in the URL or the subtle difference in the news articles

Did you percieve there was a problem with the current mix of news?

What am I missing?

[aaronptrck]

I must say I agree with you hmillington. Two sites is too confusing, I think breaking up the site in different sub-sections and allowing the user to filter the content that they wish to see would have been a better route to go.

[cowbug]

I think any confusion could be alleviated by prominent links from Toys N Brick to Toys and Brick that say something like "for LEGO news, click here" and vice versa.

[Brick & Blue]

I think it would have made more sense to break up the site into North America sales and news and Europe sales and news.

[legoeggo]

I agree with hmillington. Personally I like the site the way it is, and it is mainly a site with sales news which I like as Eurobricks tends to have the most in depth reviews and discussion but nothing on sales, promotions and other stuff. Don't get me wrong I still like reviews on this site, and I especially like news on new sets, but I think what this site does best is for finding deals.

[peanut]

I think this site is best for finding deals too. And by moving reviews etc. to another site, toysnbricks will be even more focused on what it does best and the RSS feed will be pure deal goodness :D (although a subdomain would probably have worked too). The forums stay the same I believe which is the most important thing imo. I'm not sure about waiting till July to fully change over though. New visitors might not realize there is a difference and only bookmark 'and' for deals instead of 'n' or something idk I'm caffeinated and rambling :P

[Enbric]

I only use this site for sales reports, so splitting it into two is great for me. If I used it for news two, having two different sites would be very confusing and I wouldn't want to bookmark/switch between both.

I think the best way to solve this problem would be to simply add filters that users can choose, so only posts about sales would be shown if the user picks the "Sales" filter. I don't know the programming complications involved in this but it would certainly alleviate the annoyance of two completely different sites.

Regardless, as this is my source for deals and not news, I'm happy.

[brickz]

I think 2 sites is a good idea. Too many people think this is a deal site when its actually a news and deals site. Still easy to follow both sites through rss feed.

[hmillington]

I think this might be an ill-conceived mistake, Albert, like your redesign a year or so ago which you rightly backed out of. Of course I don't know what you're trying to achieve, and it's certainly not obvious.

We've been having a natter about it at Brickset: http://www.bricksetforum.com/discussion ... and-bricks" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

You run a great site here and this latest change seems like madness.

[Ice]

There are many reasons why we wanted another site.

1) Maintain almost a 0% downtime for at least 1 of our sites at any time.
2) There is a steady decline in the overall traffic from countries outside of North America. People see our site at first glance and instantly thinks we're just a US sales site due to the amount of sales we report.
3) We know this might frustrate some people with the split, but with a site dedicated to LEGO news, we're sure we can get some great discussions on topics other than Shopping.

Having subdomains works, but that doesn't help a 0% downtime. We run one of the fastest sites (compared to other LEGO fan sites) as we believe you shouldn't have to wait for a website to load.

**Toysandbricks.com is in beta phase and has not been finalized as a permanent site yet.

[GuaranteedUnity]

Subdomains do not need to be hosted by the same company if your worry about downtime is that extreme.

Splitting sites across multiple hosting companies also does not guarantee you 0% downtime.

Besides, if one site goes down, how are visitors supposed to know to try the other one?