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

July 24, 2015
Friday New Product: Kossel Pro, SketchBo...

Today we have two superstars - the Kossel Pro 3D Printer and the SketchBoard. Both are relatively new add-ons to the Solarbotics website. Initially created as a Kickstarter project and designed around the OpenBeam aluminum extrusion system, Kossel Pro is now available for purchase. It comes with a spool of 1.75mm PLA filament (random color) […]

February 5, 2014
Wednesday Links: Robot Light Painting, M...

Masking tape and storytelling! Calcium pills and Scandinavian gods! Stop signs and distant relatives. None of the above mentioned things are going to be featured in this post, although they are extremely noteworthy. But all the things in the universe are interconnected, so there's still a chance that this stuff will make sense for someone. […]

April 29, 2003
New Gearmotors!

We're very excited to announce these new "baby" versions of the popular GM2 and GM3 gearmotors. These junior versions offer a 120:1 gear reduction ratio, built-in safety clutch, and 146rpm with 20in*oz torque at 5V drawing onlyh 90mA (620mA at stall). Take a look at them in the motors section of our website! The new […]

September 16, 2010
NYC, New hires, Pick and Place, & M...

NYC: Yup, we're tired of the drizzly weather here in Western Canada and are packing up and heading East to the land of Cheesecake and subways. We're registered for the Open Source Hardware Summit and we're helping out at the Maker Shed at the Maker Faire. That, and we're going to do some sight-seeing. New […]

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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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