More about website development

Dave Hrynkiw
October 15, 2019

A decent website is a core of a web-centric store like ours. Back in the early days, I hand-coded HTML (yeah, go back to waybackmachine to admire that work), and what you got is what you got. Since then, we rebuilt Solarbotics.com through 3 more iterations of totally refactored hand-coded platforms, and then 2 aborted attempts as re-releases on Magento and then WordPress/Woocommerce. Those last two attempts cost us the ball-park of a really really nice Tesla with nothing much to show for it, with a devastating website hack in-between to kick us in the nether-regions. Many expensive and painful lessons were learned in this process.

Since then, we've released unsatisfactory consultants, brought the development management in-house, and piece-mealed specific development aspects to consultants with MUCH better results. It's come at the cost of letting our internal R&D coast for the better part of a year while we focus our top-talent on getting the website reworked, but its something that needed to be done.

We are about to re-release Solarbotics.com on a WordPress/Woocommerce platform, with some new features added, and some others removed. We'll be staging out further enhancements as we get comfortable with the platform, and hope you'll continue being good customers of Solarbotics.com.

MORE POSTS

June 10, 2013
Project Monday: Musical Gears

Sometimes we get the opportunity to help out select people who are developing projects for a good cause. One of those things dear to our hearts is inspiring children with science and electronics. So when John Porter came to us looking for a hand to make a musical gear project as part of an exhibit […]

May 12, 2005
Sumovore 3rd Place at PDXBot!

Just browsing through the results of the last PDXBot in Portland (if you ever get the chance, check it out - it's a quality gig). Anyways, I noticed that the Sumovore "Enterprise" entered by "Azalia Middle School comander" won 3rd place in the Amateur class! Well done!

November 3, 2003
Basic Stamp 2 Sumovore code

For those of you with the Basic Stamp 2 addition* to the Sumovore here is some Code to get you started. You will need to download the Editor from Parallax to load and edit the code. *The BS2 add on board will be up for sale very soon

July 12, 2016
Fosshape and Wonderflex at Solarbotics

With our recent experiences with the costuming and cosplay communities, we've learned a lot about new materials that cosplayers use for making masks, props and armour. That added a few new words to our vocabulary and awesome new items to our inventory. First, Fosshape. It is a felt-like polyester fabric that can be stretched and […]

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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.