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

December 5, 2003
Catalog glitches...

Grrr... Time to start handing out the 1000 lashes with a wet noodle. There's a few pricing errors in the new catalog 6: The RM2 motor is not 2 for $10.75/ea CDN - it's 1 for $3.40 or 2 for $2.85/ea CDN The SC2422 solar cell is not 2 for 2.55/ea USD - it's 2 […]

May 17, 2004
The 2004 Robotgames are over...

...and it was fun! Solarbotics was busy, showing off our new kits and gear motors, and shaking hands with a large number of our customers. Yeah, there weren't any "official" BEAM events, but we still had a good time running our Solarbotics-sponsored SolarSpeeder race, with the winner being 8(?) year old Devon Bateman (taking home […]

July 12, 2007
Circuit: Shok

You want a simple Photovore? This very tidy design by Solarbotics' own Grant McKee is based on a technique developed by Mark Tilden - Shok architecture.

December 23, 2015
Solarbotics Holiday Hours

Once a year we make sure to give our minions a little bit of time off. Christmas Hours Thursday, December 24 - Closed Friday, December 25 - Closed Shipping will resume Monday, December 28. New Years Hours Thursday, December 31 - Open until 1pm MST Friday, January 1 - Closed Shipping will resume Monday, January […]

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