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 20, 2013
Friday New Product: LED Strings, Snowfla...

Festive occasions are right around the corner so we thought we’d treat you to some shiny stuff. In these times of heightened economic activity (I mean mostly gift giving) some super bright 2.8Watt LEDs and tiny SMD LEDs on a wire that come in a variety of brilliant colours might come in handy for the […]

June 29, 2001
Closed for Canada Day

We are closed for Canada Day, July 1st and the following day. We are sorry for any inconveniences, we will reopen on July 3rd and will be open for the rest of the week. We will be open on Independence Day July 4th. Happy Canada Day! Read More...

November 7, 2004
PDXBot Video

We just received an inventory of PDXBot.04 DVDs that we're selling in part to raise funds for the Portland Area Robotics Society (PARTS). It's a pretty hefty video - over 2 hours long, with many features, including a few cameos of "The Dave and Grant Show" (we were there competing last year). It's a good […]

February 28, 2011
Sherline Closing Sale

Because we use their great products while making robots, we've also carried Sherline products almost since we started Solarbotics. But the time has come to start cutting things that aren't core to our business, and the Sherline machine tools definitely take valuable time from open-source hardware hacking, lasering, and pick'n'placing. For 1 week only, we're […]

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