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 18, 2008
Telephone interruptions Scheduled

Now why would we schedule interruptions? Umm... because it gives us time to enjoy a cookie and milk without the phone ringing. Every accidentally dip your headset mic into a glass of milk? It starts to smell funky in a day or two... Anyway, it isn't really our fault - it's just some local infrastructure […]

November 9, 2011
DragonTail Project, New Stuff, Sales

IT IS NOW NOVEMBER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. STAY CALM. While a change in month is always an unsettling event, this one is particularly dreadful. Why exactly, we're not sure. But we have the feeling that if it was called 'Yesvember', things would be a lot more... Positive. So we're doing what we can […]

February 21, 2014
Friday New Product and a Little Bit of F...

Solarbotics is helping out local fashion designers prepare their e-wearables for the Calgary MakeFashion. This time, Tony Grimes dropped in to experiment with his fiber-optic cloth from SensingTex as an illuminating surface, but the included 5mm LED was not dazzling enough. Time to hack in our 3W RGB Star Controller! The plan was to shift […]

September 19, 2000
SSK Head to SW2 instructions / schematic...

Still slogging through the backlog of "things to add to the website". One of them is the ScoutWalker/SunSeeker interface instructions, in PDF format (as per usual). So if you want to see exactly how we get the head "talking" to the body, and what the exact circuitry is, come take a look! We also are […]

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.