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

March 6, 2012
More of a Bug Hunt than a stand up fight...

So as some of you have noticed our new site went up yesterday, but unfortunately not without some issues. Today is a day of bug hunting, (which makes the Weyland-Yutani shirt I'm wearing even more appropriate) and thanks to the efforts of those of you who have taken the time to email me I've been […]

October 10, 2010
Canadian Thanksgiving, eh?

Sorry, our office is closed Monday, October 11 for Canadian Thanksgiving. Being further north, we have to eat our turkeys sooner. If we don't do it now and celebrate it with our American cousins next month, the turkeys freeze to the tundra, and we have to suck on Turkeysicles. Ick. We'll be back to work […]

May 7, 2012
Project Monday: BEAM Solar Chariots

"Project Monday"? What the heck is that? We're giving our news postin' habits a bit of an overhaul. Here's the plan: instead of one massive newspost once a week, we're going to break things up a bit. Monday's we'll post a cool project or tutorial that might be fun to try. Wednesdays, we'll post some […]

June 16, 2004
GM15 Nano Robot Sumo

We've had some requests about our own demo Nano robot sumo "BittyBad", which uses a pair of GM15 gear motors. On the GM15 detail page, you'll see a picture of it! It features 2 GM15 gear motors, two 90mA/h LiPoly 3.7V batteries (in series), two "ProxDots" objects sensors, a pair of edge-sensors and a (gasp!) […]

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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!

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.

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