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

March 5, 2003
BEP Requests?

We've been kicking around what to do as our next Bicore Experimenter's PCB Application note. As we're deadlocked on several ideas, we thought it'd be worthwhile to open it up to you. What sort of new BEP application would you like to see us produce next? Let us know by clicking on the "Posted By:" […]

July 20, 2012
New Products: All-Seeing Eye, LCDs

A while ago we showed off the prototype/demo for the All-Seeing Eye, and from the positive response it got we decided to bring it back as An Actual Thing. We even mounted it to a DragonTail, and let it go for a spin around the office. Check it out: We briefly toyed with the idea […]

December 10, 2002
New Distributors

Solarbotics would like to announce two new distributors, one in Italy, and the other in Mexico (who says robots aren't cool world-wide?): Robot-Italy is now our dealer out of the ancient city of Rome. We hope to visit them there one day! Our other new distributor is Robodacta, out of Mexico City. Another nice, warm, […]

July 12, 2007
Circuit: Stepper Motor

This is a neat little one-chip circuit we originally tuned for use with our "SM1" Stepper motors. We've presently sold out of the motor, but this circuit has proved to be a good unidirectional (1-way) driver for small stepper motors.

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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.