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 12, 2012
New Product: Arduino WiFi Shield and Dis...

The lonely product in the long-time-ago previous product post has filed a complaint to the INPDL (International New Product Defendant League) against having to represent the Friday Product Post by itself for an entire month. We therefore had to comply by bringing in some new stock to switch out. So here's an Arduino WiFi Shield […]

November 2, 2003
GM10's not here yet!

We fully expected that the boat would beat your copy of "Nuts and Volts". Apparently it hasn't! Our GM10's are due this Thursday (the 6th of November), so stay tuned for the official release then. No, we don't have pricing yet - it depends on what our total shipping cost comes out to be. Stay […]

February 14, 2017
Solarbotics at the Calgary City Teachers...

Solarbotics will be at the Calgary City Teachers' Convention Thursday & Friday, February 16 and 17, 2017. We will demo a variety of educational kits for teachers to use in classrooms, including introductory kits to develop skills in programming, mechanical construction, and soldering. Come put a face to the name at booth 727 at Calgary […]

April 25, 2011
Looking for additions to our own IT Crow...

(Thanks for the interest - welcome Chris to the team!) Our IT task at Solarbotics have grown beyond "Did you try turning it off and then on again?", so we're in the hiring market for an IT Guru & website manager. Please, we're only interested in applicants that can work here, in Calgary, Alberta. Sorry, […]

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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.