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 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. […]

May 3, 2006
New Pogo Push Probes in stock

I can't imagine why, but some people want to use these push pogo pins for other uses than robot appendages. Or battery contacts. Apparently they're really good for something called "JTAG applications" too, but I'll leave that up to you to decide. Scroll down to see them listed in the "New Items" column.

December 11, 2003
New Solarbotics Website

Welcome to the new Solarbotics Website! You'll notice some substantial upgrades. We're on our own server, which means very quick and speedy surfing. The website is also totally re-written from scratch. This is a double-edge sword, as this means we're still working on re-porting over older documents, like the BEP applications. Look! A search button! […]

November 8, 2013
Friday New Product: Ribbon Cable, RGB LE...

We got some sticks for sale today. Some are bendable sticks. You can use them as a belt and if you are near the hydroelectrostation dam you can put the power wire into water and that will pick up some leftover electricity and you get a glowing belt. Now other things are measuring devices. You […]

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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.