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

December 10, 2002
Catalog 5 online

If you haven't got a print catalog in the mail yet, you can now download it as a 1.5 megabyte PDF file. Or, request one via mail if you wish! Download (or request) it via our catalog request page.

February 10, 2017
Web Links Friday

A Batman Jacket Made With 10,000 Lego Bricks Lego and Batman rolled in one? Geek factor level 80. (Via Fashionablygeek.com) Japanese Scientists Artificially Pollinate Flowers with a Bee drone Lookit this electric thing smacking the poor lily up the face! Bees are much more gentle. Save the bees. Technology is cool, but bees are better. […]

May 3, 2006
Microsoft ... BEAM Robots?!?

Solarbotics held a few workshops and lectures at the MAKEr faire April 22/23rd. After giving a workshop, a nice man from Microsoft invited me over to see their BEAM robots. Obviously intregued, I found their display at the Microsoft pavilion where Microsoft encouraged all their engineers with "MAKE"-style hobbies to exhibit, including this squad of […]

May 4, 2007
Wheee! They're here - the new RW2!

We've just got in our newly-machined RW2 hubs & tires - and they're better! Instead of the old 1/8" axle hole that didn't quite fit the GM11a-14a series correctly (they were too loose), these new ones fit perfectly with their 3mm hole!

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