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

September 14, 2000
Minor Additions and New Links

Boy, there's work to do on new websites. Link checking, spell checking, image links - all sorts of crap that doesn't have anything to do directly with robots! Even so, we've been able to put up a few new images of Mark Tilden's "Projectorbots" on the Photovores page. Yuck. Must do something about how hard […]

January 9, 2010
Pick and Place & Magazine Ads on Fl...

Well, 2010 is in full swing and we've been pretty busy. We don't have any new product to show off this week, but our Flickr feed has been getting a lot of love - we just received our first pick and place machine(s), and we've uploaded all of our magazine ads. Well, I guess that's […]

December 12, 2007
Make was a blast... but now onto the Hol...

Wow, has it been that long already? The MAKEr Faire in Austin was beautiful, and interesting. Funny how we saw many Texans driving along with their windows up, while us two Canadians were wearing shorts with the top down on our rental. Interesting how people adjust to different climates! The MAKEr Faire wasn't quite as […]

November 19, 2019
Hello...? Is this thing on....?

This is was just a Test. This is a test of the Dave broadcasting system. If this was a real Dave, you'd be notified what to do in the eventuality that you met a real Dave. This has been a test of the Dave broadcasting system. *Beeeeeep*     Ok, it seems like we've got […]

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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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