Last summer during a Solarbotics Robotics for Educators session, one of the teachers noted something about many of the mainstream robotics and electronics learning platforms commonly used in classrooms. He said that those platforms suffered from the Black Box Effect. This effect was where the “black boxes,” the controllers, were plugged into the computer and […]
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
New addition to SB Krew, secret fun stuf...
Well, last week I told you that I'd have (and I quote) "something more exciting and substantial for you." So I'd like to take this opportunity (on behalf of the other fine folks at Solarbotics) to welcome the newest addition to the team, Tom! He'll be heading up purchasing and finding neat new toys to […]
Website Issue: Country and Province Entr...
Hello Everyone! Some of you may have noticed that when trying to complete your order, our website is not allowing you to get passed the billing/shipping information input. Fear not! We have located the issue and working diligently to fix it but in the meantime, please complete your order as a guest rather than using […]
New Construction Material!
We now sell Sintra, a lightweight, easy to work with material that comes in a variety of colors including white, red, blue and yellow. Check the link at: Sintra Sales page Sintra is easy to cut by scoring a line with a knife and then breaking it. Glue also works well bonding pieces of sintra […]
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!
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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.