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 12, 2001
Tilden Interview - Video 2 Teaser

As an exercise on our video editting station, we compiled a quick 5 minute teaser of an interview we had with Mark Tilden on all manner of BEAM topics. View it As a 8.2meg Windows Media WMV file (15fps, 160x120) As a 1.8meg Real Media RM file (15fps, 160x120)

February 17, 2006
New Gearmotor - the GM17

Hellooooo! I love getting new gearmotors to test. I get to break them apart, poke them, submit them to torture test - it's all great fun. My latest victim of inspection is our new GM17 HE Offset gearmotor. It uses a very power efficient 300-form factor motor to drive the 228:1 gearbox. It isn't a […]

January 15, 2018
Shipping Cutoff Notice

Attention everyone placing orders: due to being short-staffed, the shipping cutoff time tomorrow, January 16th, will be noon. All orders placed after this will be processed and shipped the next day.

August 21, 2017
Solar Eclipse at SB

Today August 21, 2017, we were treated to about 80% solar eclipse. In spite of the smoke, the weather cooperated so we couldn't miss this event. Pinhole projector boxes were made out of cereal and shipping boxes: Fancy ones were mounted onto a tripod, and a phone camera recording a time lapse video was taped […]

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Solarbotics has been operating for more than 25 years, bringing electronics know-how and supplies to both the electronics professional and hobbyist. We'll be happy to help you too!

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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.

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