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 11, 2002
Junkbots book website

We've just had the author copies of the book arrive today! Woohoo! That means that our regular inventory must be near behind. Stay tuned! This is as good as a time to announce the support website for the book at http://junkbots.solarbotics.com. The book says come to our website for support, but we've since constructed a […]

November 1, 2016
New Product: Displays

Prop SX Controller $103.99 Advanced prop designers and industrial engineers have asked us for more horsepower and that's what we've delivered with the Prop-SX. LK204-24-USB-WB USB LCD Module $103.00 USB 4 line by 20 character Display with lots of features! White on blue. 2.8" TFT Touchscreen $47.18 Add some jazz & pizazz to your project […]

March 21, 2014
Friday New Product: MaKey Deluxe, Tiny L...

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August 26, 2004
Solarbotics workshop at the Robothon

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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.