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 16, 2004
GM15 Nano Robot Sumo

We've had some requests about our own demo Nano robot sumo "BittyBad", which uses a pair of GM15 gear motors. On the GM15 detail page, you'll see a picture of it! It features 2 GM15 gear motors, two 90mA/h LiPoly 3.7V batteries (in series), two "ProxDots" objects sensors, a pair of edge-sensors and a (gasp!) […]

June 21, 2012
Gone to da Faire

"What gives, where are all the newsposts this week?" Well, let me tell you. We've been running around like crazy people (which comes disturbingly easy to most of us) getting ready for the Vancouver Maker Faire, which many of our staff (including your humble poster of news) will be attending. So you'll have to hang […]

August 28, 2010
Lotsa Inventory, BeetleBot Reviews

Wowza. It's been a a busy couple of weeks. So let's get the big thing out of the way, alright? All inventory from HVWTech.com has been added to Solarbotics.com! Seriously. We got a million more categories to match the bajillion more items we've added, but it's all there. We've even cleaned up some of the […]

November 13, 2002
Sumobot Circuits

We've been having fun playing with the L293D driver chip. It's one of those things to see how much you can make it do by itself (like with any BEAM application!). Grant McKee has been experimenting with some simple additions to the chip to make it (unto itself) a suitable brain for a simple mini-sumo […]

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