We're involved with a couple of upcoming workshops featuring our Sumovore Mini-Sumo! (No local link yet, until it's officially on sale - sorry!) The first one is at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) Open House in Edmonton, Alberta. Besides a mini-sumo, full-size sumo, fire-fighting, and line-follower, they're also running two workshops, one on […]
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
OpenBeam's Fantastic Kossel Pro 3D Print...
It's pretty amazing to see the adoption rate of 3D printers in the last few years, and the kind of creativity they bring out in people. I've seen quite a few variations, particularly while walking through the 3D printer villages at the MakerFaires I've already attended (either as a vendor or just a visitor), but […]
New Bundle: The Northern Lights!
Ok, more like The Northern light. There's only one, but it creates lots of light! We made the SB-Firefly as a ATtiny85-based blinky light / "chewing-gum & duct-tape problem solver", that is also Digispark compatible. We made the Star Controller 3-watt RGB LED kit as an easy way to tame bright and power-hungry LEDs. We […]
Website maintenance
So, didja all have a good Holiday Break? Yeah, we did too. Need a vacation to recover from the vacation... Enough chit-chat: Just a quick note to let you know we're expecting a bit of an outage January 6th at 2am MST (that's -7GMT, I think). Our server is being affected by an upstream upgrade […]
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!
Solarbotics, Ltd. is not responsible for misprints or errors on product prices or information. For more information, please see our Terms and Conditions.
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.