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

November 18, 2004
Book Project Parts Bundles

We've had many requests to sell the parts needed to build the robots described in the books that we carry. You are now able to purchase the individual components needed to build your bot, but you're not required to take them all(Sorry, no instructions -- that's what the book is for!). If you've got resistors […]

October 31, 2014
Solarbotics Halloween PumLantern Hack

This is a message that does not announce Halloween a stat holiday at Solarbotics - but enhances the Halloween spirit by bringing you a fancy porch or window decoration idea. We call it the   Pum-kin-Lantern! Here's an easy recipe: take the guts of Pum Lantern, place it in a mixing bowl with some pumpkins, add […]

November 8, 2006
New TINY Pogo Pin Probes

We had some requests for some really, really small Pogo Push Pin Probes (Hmmm...shoulda named them PPPPs...). Anyway, here's the PP8s and the PPH2, which are the "short" version of the PP8 and the necessary holder to mount them. If you have really tight spaces you need to test, these are the probes you'll need!

May 4, 2006
Annual Solarbotics BBQ RSVP

Hi all. It's coming up time for the annual Western Canadian Robot Games on May 13th, and as per usual, Solarbotics will be hosting our post-event wind-down. Interested in coming? Let us know here!

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