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

December 9, 2010
Parallax S2 Scribblers in stock

The new S2 Scribblers from Parallax are in, and they feature a couple of cool new features. First: They're Open-Source! Yup, they've opened up all the design files to make hacking oh-so-much easier! Secondly, it's using the Parallax Propeller chip now, for mucho-improved computational power. They're already out of stock at Parallax, so get them […]

July 7, 2005
Calgary Stampede - YaHOOO!

Don't expect too much productivity out of Solarbotics in the next 11 days as the Calgary Stampede commences tomorrow morning with the annual parade. The boss (me, Dave) is giving the morning off to the staff to see the festivities, so we'll be open at 1pm Friday July 8. As for the better part of […]

May 5, 2006
Zee Ultimate Solar Mobile...

I had been giving some advice to Mark Malmberg about some art he's been putting together. Wanna see a killer huge solar-powered hanging mobile? From the builder himself: This piece has been a test piece and learning experience. I'll show it in a couple of months at a place called the Lawrence Hall of Science […]

February 1, 2002
New Product Return Policy

We've been having our usual post-Christmas trickle of product returns (for free support), and we're noting more-than-usual levels of incomplete paperwork on the parcels. If proper paperwork isn't done, the shipping company tries to bill us for customs and duties on the products that have already been paid. This leads us to a new policy […]

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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.