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

December 21, 2011
Holiday Hours

This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but the hands that package your orders actually belong to humans. Sure, we may be a robot company, but robo-hands just aren't quite up to spec for what we need to do. So for the moment we're staffed by a contingent of mortals, and […]

June 25, 2001
New BIOBug Footage

We've just recently been given the go-ahead to unveil more Wowwee BIOBugs - the toy that Mark Tilden had direct involvement in! This is footage we shot while down in New Mexico this Spring at the 2001 LANL workshop. The first video shows the BIOBug Beetle's ability to maneuver and respond to obstacles. The second […]

June 3, 2010
BeetleBot for Sale!

Well forks, it's been a long time coming, but it's here at last. THE BEETLEBOT! <cue the massive applause> What's so fantastic about it? Well for the first time ever we've released a completely soldering-free kit.  This kit is assembled solely with screws - there's no need for snips, pliers, or a bajillion other specific […]

August 11, 2012
New Products: LED Strips, LED Controller...

Hello everyone, today I'll be your guest Russian host. Here's your new product, look at it and leave me alone! I'm busy eating vodka and drinking borscht. In the dacha. After the banya. (Is that good enough for Russian stereotypes?) Right about now the most observant of you might notice that something is wrong with […]

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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!

Solarbotics, Ltd. is not responsible for misprints or errors on product prices or information. For more information, please see our Terms and Conditions.

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.

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