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 22, 2013
Friday New Product: New Netduino and Rov...

Yaaaay, we finally have some new stuff to show off! Firstly, Secret Labs have released Netduino 2 and Netduino Plus 2 with some welcome upgrades. Netduino became even faster with more code space, and we have them in stock! Here's what else we have: Netduino Go Starter Kit $99.95 Love the Netduino but not a […]

November 16, 2009
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Our clear breadboard was recently blogged on Makezine, which reminded me we juuuust about had an instructable ready for that same item. So, a few hours later, it is finished and posted. And while I was at it, I finished editing another Instructable by Jerome Demers, our intern. He did up a DIY Miniball instructable […]

September 23, 2003
The Wowwee RoboSapien

Wonder what Mark Tilden has been up to? Prepare to be knocked on your butt - this BEAM-tech Biped walking robot toy looks like a killer for this year's Christmas season! Check it out at our sponsored community server at http://www.solarbotics.net/gallery/Wowwee-Robosapien

February 13, 2013
Wednesday Cool Links: Laser Experiments,...

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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.