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 27, 2012
The Solarbotics Web Team Needs Beta Test...

We've got a shiny new revision of our website on the horizon, and we want to hear from you, our finest scallywags and loyal customers. So before all the new bits go live, we're planning to do a closed beta test running the span of September. We're looking for 20-30 testers to help us run […]

May 20, 2010
Maker Faire, Closed Mon. May 24th

Hey look, we're at Maker Faire! Hey look, we're at the Solarbotics Office! ... Hey look, we're like an  amoeba, splitting in half to be in two places at once. Ok, here's the skinny -  Right now, most of our staff is US-bound to attend the previously mentioned MakerFaire in the San Mateo/Bay Area in […]

July 24, 2009
PICAXE stock, soldering tutorial

Well, it's the end of another week, and - Hey! I have something that you might actually be interested in. We've just received some PICAXE inventory, particularly the PICAXE-28 Project Board. So that's now available and ready for us to throw into a box (not literally, of course) and send in your direction. And now that […]

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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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!

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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.

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