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

February 1, 2002
New Product Return Policy

We've been having our usual post-Christmas trickle of product returns (for free support), and we're noting more-than-usual levels of incomplete paperwork on the parcels. If proper paperwork isn't done, the shipping company tries to bill us for customs and duties on the products that have already been paid. This leads us to a new policy […]

June 4, 2012
Project Monday: Pingbot

Tom from our Facebook page recently showed us his latest project, the Pingbot. In Tom's words, it's "a very small (38mm diameter), usb rechargeable, programmable, musical, remote control robot designed for maximum fun and danceability." We don't know about you, but danceability should be a priority on every robot's feature list. Check out some video […]

March 20, 2015
Friday New Product: More Grove Yet Again

SeeedStudio continues to impress us with he Grove line of Arduino/Pi/microcontroller compatible plug-in modules. Here's a fresh batch for today's product announcements.

May 2, 2014
Solarbotics at MakerFaire Bay Area

We are excited to announce that it is now official - we are going to the MakerFaire Bay Area! Solarbotics will be in the Maker Shed May 17 & 18, 2014 with some brand new product. Come check it out if you are around.

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