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 19, 2004
Robosapien video on solarbotics.net

Well, Solarbotics went to "Neeewwww Yorrrrk City" to the Toy Fair, and met up with Mark Tilden. He was kind enough to give us an exclusive interview / demonstration of the production-level version of the Robosapien. See the four videos at solarbotics.net! Update: The link got slashdotted, so we're pretty heavy on our bandwidth bills […]

February 5, 2010
Temperature Sensors, New Instructable

Woo, we've had a busy week! To start things off, we have a new category - Temperature Sensors! So far it has the following items: Humidity/Temperature Sensor DS1620+ Serial Digital Thermometer DS18B20+ Temperature Sensor Devantech TPA81 8x1 Thermopile LilyPad Temperature Sensor Yeah, it's a pretty bare category at the moment, but we'll be adding to […]

November 2, 2001
WIRED.COM and BIOBugs

Wired.com recently posted a very interesting comparison between the Wowwee/Hasbro BIO-Bugs, and the Sony Aibo. Interesting comparison! For those wanting more information, there's the BIO-Bug vivisection page at Solarbotics.net.

July 13, 2001
Solarcell Analysis - part 1

We've been working on testing our Sunceram Solarcells for real-world performance. Our first test is under direct sunlight, and we tried our best to get accurate data under ideal conditions - summer solstice, during the brightest hours of the day. As we're located in Calgary (lat:51.050N), Canada, you may get slightly different results due to […]

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