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

June 26, 2012
Original Robosapien Prototype

Well, we're all back from Maker Faire, feelin' pretty groggy but fairly alive (or, perhaps more accurately, undead - something about being in a zombie-like state sounds about right). So to break the recent drought of news posts, we've dug out a treat from the deeper regions of the Solarbotics server archives. This is some […]

January 16, 2010
SparkFun Free Day, Practical Arduino

Alrighty, the week has already slid by and it's time for another update. We have one new product to show off - Practical Arduino by Jonathan Oxer and Hugh Blemings. It contains 13 projects packed into 16 chapters/420+ pages, covering a wide array of an Arduino's potential. It's a pretty comprehensive read. Perhaps the biggest […]

December 11, 2003
New Solarbotics Website

Welcome to the new Solarbotics Website! You'll notice some substantial upgrades. We're on our own server, which means very quick and speedy surfing. The website is also totally re-written from scratch. This is a double-edge sword, as this means we're still working on re-porting over older documents, like the BEP applications. Look! A search button! […]

December 29, 2011
Closed Fri/Mon, Cool Stuffs, Purchaser W...

Well, it's the end of the year apparently. 2011 has kinda withered up and died like some kinda... Food thing that tends to dry up if you leave it out for too long. Like jerky. Or raisins. Mm, especially raisins when they're in oatmeal cookies (shh, don't tell the boss. Anything but a strict chocolate […]

Solarbotics Ltd Logo
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.