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 23, 2018
Moving ActiveTech

As some of you know, ActiveTech is changing locations and merging operations with Solarbotics. The retail store is going to take the space where the former RnD lab was, and we've been working hard to prepare that area for the move-in.

September 11, 2002
Its a boy!

Congratulations go out to Dave and Cheryl for the birth of their new baby, Dason. Dason was born September 11, 2002 at 4:16 AM weighing in at 9 pounds 14 ounces.

June 27, 2002
Mmmmm... Sandwich PCB's!

David Cook of the Robot Room asked us if we'd carry the partner PCB's for his book 'Robot Building for Beginners'. As we're an enthusiastic fan of this excellent book, we agreed to carry it for him. (even though we don't sell the book...yet!) Please note: You require a copy of this book to successfully […]

February 18, 2010
Mark Tilden's 600 foot workbench

Well, it's more like a workbench 600 feet in the air. In his apartment. In Hong Kong. Nice view... Dig around the large image to see what cool stuff you can pick out. Gareth @ Make Magazine (where it was first posted last week) already found a "teacup Stirling Engine" at 10 o'clock (near the […]

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