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

June 17, 2004
Roundabout Pieces!

David Cook wrote a book. That book is a technically a Cook book, but we won't call it that. We'll call it Intermediate Robot Building (no, we don't have it yet, we're still waiting for our order!), and it heavily features the Roundabout Robot. If you're familiar with Mr. Cook's first book Robot Building for […]

December 1, 2008
Arduino Book...and the Pendulum Swing!

Here's a great booklet to accompany any new Freeduino purchase - "Getting Started with Arduino", written by Massimo Banzi (the co-founder of the Arduino Project). This title is based on his free-download introduction PDF, but takes is much farther, guiding new electronics enthusiasts into how to use the Arduino / Freeduino in a project.  Also […]

September 5, 2006
Turbot Review @ StreetTech!

Just got the word that Gareth Branwyn posted a review of our Turbot on his website at Streettech.com. Thinking of getting a Turbot? Here's a straight-shooting review! While you're there, take a look at the Solaroller article that was just posted. Neat stuff!

October 24, 2016
Robot Costume Hack

Since Halloween is just around the corner we've built and published a few projects in order to give some ideas to the DIY costume-inclined folks. One is DIY Halloween RGB LED Kitty Ears and two is Halloween LED Witch Hat. So for this third hack we started with an online-bought robot costume, but being a […]

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