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

January 13, 2011
SparkFun Free-Day Aftermath

After last year's meltdown of servers during SparkFun's 1st "Free Day", we sent them flowers of condolence. This year, after seeing that little image of a burning computer on their error webpage , we felt he urgent need to send down the entire Canadian fire brigade (yup, both extinguishers). And who better to put out […]

August 8, 2017
Project: LED Earrings

The idea of adorning oneself with glowing bits has been around forever, but instead of smearing ourselves with phosphorescent jellyfish or placing fireflies in ears like some uncivilized cavemen we went for simple LED earrings. We made a build that involves a simple slow-scroll RGB LED and a few reflective bits to bounce that pretty […]

October 7, 2005
Mmmmmm...Turkey....(insert drool here).

Monday October 10th is Canadian Thanksgiving and Solarbotics will be closed so all our employees can spend the day with their families. We will be open on Tuesday October 11th at 9:00am MST and all will be business as usual again. Happy Thanksgiving folks!

December 9, 2003
Kyle on Discovery TV

Kyle Simmons has been very busy lately, particularly being on TV! If you're getting the Canadian Discovery Channel, check him out tonight on 'Daily Planet' (22 minutes into the program). Hmmm.... nice kits you're featuring there! For those of you who missed it, EXN.CA has the clip online! Read More...

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