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

November 17, 2016
Starry Night Pendant Assembly Guide

We've already blogged about the Technology Grad Dresses, which are accompanied by the Starry Night Pendant as a perfect finishing touch to complete the outfit. Since then, we've upgraded and improved the Pendant design to make it a fully documented kit, rather than just a bundle: The 2xAAA battery holder offers longer life, less cost […]

December 6, 2010
As with baking...

...DON'T FORGET ABOUT THE OVEN. You'll burn the cookies while eating the dough! Just got a new LOUD oven timer to make sure somebody is standing over the PCBs when the timer is about up. Pick and place machines tend to drown out gentle oven beeps!

September 18, 2008
Telephone interruptions Scheduled

Now why would we schedule interruptions? Umm... because it gives us time to enjoy a cookie and milk without the phone ringing. Every accidentally dip your headset mic into a glass of milk? It starts to smell funky in a day or two... Anyway, it isn't really our fault - it's just some local infrastructure […]

July 26, 2005
BIG Solar cars in Calgary tomorrow!

The America Solar Challenge finishes here in Calgary tomorrow (July 27) betweein 11 and 3:30pm! The teams are coming up over McKnight Blvd., which isn't far from our offices. We'll be out watching them go by for a few hours tomorrow, so if the phones don't get answered for a bit, you'll know why. Go […]

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