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

January 14, 2002
BEP Documentation Update

We've tweaked the documentation for the BEP-MSE1 "Miller Solarengine" to correct a minor error (if you wanted to use the MVSE modification, this is the correct on), and added some circuit specs. Application notes for all the modules are in the works- stay tuned!

August 24, 2012
New Product: OPEN BEAM! (..and some othe...

We have a pretty darn big announcement for you today: we're now distributing Open Beam! It's a new handy-dandy construction system that got its start from Kickstarter, and is gaining a lot of immediate support. Right now, we're stocking all the items except for the kits, which we'll probably bring onboard in the near future. […]

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 […]

June 4, 2012
Project Monday: Pingbot

Tom from our Facebook page recently showed us his latest project, the Pingbot. In Tom's words, it's "a very small (38mm diameter), usb rechargeable, programmable, musical, remote control robot designed for maximum fun and danceability." We don't know about you, but danceability should be a priority on every robot's feature list. Check out some video […]

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