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

April 1, 2004
New Kits: The Spazovore and the SunSwing...

Yup, we've got a few new kits ready, the Spazovore beginner's kit, and the SunSwinger Pendulum kit. We're pretty happy with both of these kits, so scroll down a bit, and read about them below!

February 20, 2009
Weekend tidbits

Greetings my fellow humans! And salutations to my not-so-fellow alien amigo! There are a few small tidbits of news this weekend: First, we received our shipment of new Herbie PCBs! Hurray! This means that you can now get Herbie the Mousebot in all four colours - red, black, blue or white.  They're all in stock, […]

April 10, 2008
Solar Pendulum of DOOOM blogged on MAKE

I love MAKE magazine. I always enjoy reading (then trying) the projects in each magazine. I was a bit disappointed in their last issue where they didn't cover the complete process to make gunpowder, but that's a minor complaint. I just noticed on their blog that they're talking about our Solar Pendulum kit and Christopher […]

August 28, 2015
Friday New Product: PCBGrip

PCBGrip Cylinder Accessory (4 pack) $7.20 This accessory is great for adding standoffs and rotating elements to your PCBGrip (or Openbeam!). PCBGrip Tri Nut Accessory (pairs) $5.52 Inserting and aligning nuts into Openbeam can be a bit tricky, but this clever, simple tri-nut insert is a simple, effective solution to the problem. T-Bolt Accessory (pairs) […]

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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.