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

April 30, 2007
Dave Hylands is only a marginal friend o...

Although he has purchased from us, and used our products (the "Secret Motor Driver") in his prize-winning minisumo "Stinger", we, as Solarbotics officially declare Mr. Hylands only "marginal" friend. You see, Solarbotics sent a few of our robots to the University of Northern Idaho's mail-in minisumo contest, and again he's served our own tuckus back […]

April 12, 2004
Coming to the WCRG this year?

Thinking of coming to the Western Canadian Robot Games this year? Although the games don't have any BEAM events this year, we're still planning on being there to meet up with our customers (and enter a few 'bots in competition!). As usual, we're planning at also having our free annual post-event BBQ, so if you'll […]

July 6, 2001
Faster Download Times!

We are improving the site once again! You'll notice that our Products, Galleries, and Old News page(s) will load faster. All the same information is there, it just has a more streamlined approach, reducing the download time (especially for Sherline Machines!). So check it out! Read More...

January 26, 2012
Brutusbot Vids, Dragon PumLantern

Well, we have some good news and some bad news. First, the good. We've been keeping incredibly busy working on bringing in some new products. The bad news... We've been incredibly busy. So busy on new products (and a few big projects), in fact, that we don't really have anything ready to show you (yet). […]

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