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

August 12, 2014
Important Message on Shipping

Canada Post and Purolator both are experiencing server outages, so that means that we won't be able to ship any orders today. They are working on it and hopefully will fix it soon. This may also mean our shipping estimator will have trouble placing quotes and calculating your shipping. Please please try again a little […]

May 16, 2005
Western Canadian Robot Games 2005!

Well, we had a fun time at this year's Western Canadian Robot Games! Especially since Solarbotics' own Grant McKee won advanced minisumo with "Ender's Wraith", and although he also placed 2nd with "S.S. Solo" (but wasn't legally able to win 2 spots), the third place bump up went to...me! Dave Hrynkiw, with 2Strong2Bad! Besides the […]

October 16, 2012
New Product Friday: Cables, Adapters, Ju...

Well, I'm officially out of words, and again reverting to non-verbal expression.  I already tried to interpretively dance the new product post before. That leaves me completely out of options here. So how about I sleep interpretively? Or breathe... Now, that's just plain weird. Better I sleepwalk then: 4-conductor, 20AWG ribbon cable (Blue, Green, Yellow, […]

September 2, 2012
Oh, Right. We're Closed Monday, Septembe...

Whoops, we totally forgot. Tomorrow is good ol' Labour Day-bour, and you know what that means. Yup, we are closed on Monday, September the 3rd. You know, exactly how we just said in the post title. So the same stuff as usual - submit orders, leave messages/emails. We'll pick things up again and resume order […]

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Solarbotics has been operating for more than 25 years, bringing electronics know-how and supplies to both the electronics professional and hobbyist. We'll be happy to help you too!

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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.

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