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

February 27, 2024
Evil Mad Scientist Inventory... Welcome ...

Earlier in January we had a very interesting discussion with the chief geeks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs. They've been doing similarly-unique DIY as Solarbotics for a good long time, but they had now found themselves in the position of shuttering their operation to take some lead rolls with Bantam Tools. This meant moving from […]

March 20, 2013
Wednesday Cool Links: The Flying Stuff, ...

Solarbotics and the Useless Box have been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article "Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don't Try This"! It is dedicated to the historical overview of the uselessness starting with its invention in the 1950s to nowadays. The useless box can take many guises, names and materials […]

April 9, 2009
Closed for Easter Weekend, Special Deal

We're coming up on that magical time of year when rabbits tend to poop chocolate eggs. Which, quite frankly, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Couple that with April 1st, where the object is to mess with people, and this sure makes for a bizarre month. But hey - when a strange, chocolaty rodent is enough […]

January 13, 2009
I see the light!

When winter settles in around these parts, daylight doesn't seem to last too long. So like moths we tend to get excited about the new bright and shiny toys we bring in. Today we have Super Bright LEDs - they're the nifty little units we put in the HexPummer Lantern to create that extra pulse […]

Solarbotics Ltd Logo
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.