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

May 19, 2011
We're CLOSED for Maker Faire

Yeah, we warned you. We're not even in our office to write out this newspost. Nay, this is one of them fancy pre-recorded messages. It may or may not self destruct. So, yes, we're closed from May 19th (Thursday) to the 24th  (Tuesday). We'll resume filling/shipping orders and replying to any correspondance once we're back […]

December 14, 2021
Solarbotics / Active-Tech Holiday Hours ...

Looking forward to a bit of recharge time after the holiday rush! While being in that mindset, here's our holiday schedule for both Solarbotics and the Active-Tech Calgary Storefront: December 24th - 9:30-1:30pm December 25th - Closed (HO HO HO!) December 26th - Closed (Whooboy... leftovers and toys!) December 27th - Closed (Moar leftovers... and […]

March 1, 2018
Product Feature: Bare Conductive Project...

We are always on the search of cool technology, so when we came across Bare Conductive, we thought: pizza! what a great find! Bare Conductive is a design and technology company from the UK that makes sensing tools for engineers, designers, and makers. They produce a line of electrically conductive paint, capacitive sensor hardware and a […]

November 16, 2009
New Instructables!

Our clear breadboard was recently blogged on Makezine, which reminded me we juuuust about had an instructable ready for that same item. So, a few hours later, it is finished and posted. And while I was at it, I finished editing another Instructable by Jerome Demers, our intern. He did up a DIY Miniball instructable […]

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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.