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

October 14, 2003
StrongBad victorious again!

Our trip to RoboMaxx was great fun, and StrongBad did it again, winning first place in the Advanced Mini-Sumo competition! The GM6 gear motors did their job, rarely failing to give StrongBad the ability to power opponents out of the ring. We also entered our Sumovore Sumo robot kit (officially available in a day or […]

December 21, 2019
Solarbotics / Active-Tech Calgary in-sto...

  Solarbotics / Active-Tech Calgary Store Sale! Although we have a new website, we're still working on bringing over the inventory from Active-Tech into it. In the meanwhile, we're participating in the Active-Tech sale, with additional items from Solarbotics Ltd. Solarbotics_Active_Calgary_December_2019_Sale and come on by our store to take advantage of it until January 5 […]

June 2, 2009
Maker Faire, Nunchucky, PumLantern

WOW! What a week! Most of us have returned from Maker Faire, where we had a fantastic time. We met a lot of great people, saw loads of neat projects and displays, and got a chance to take in some beautiful California weather.  We're absolutely exhausted after an insanely long and busy weekend, but we're […]

October 9, 2009
What can you do with a GM15?

...oh, just save the Republic! Just got this note in from Rob Meyer, who is using 3 of our GM15 pager gearmotors to drive his 1/18 scale R2-D2. Given that the real R2-D2 measures 108cm tall, that makes this cute cousin only 6cm (2.36") tall! There's a GM15 for each of the drive wheels, and […]

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