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

July 13, 2001
Solarcell Analysis - part 1

We've been working on testing our Sunceram Solarcells for real-world performance. Our first test is under direct sunlight, and we tried our best to get accurate data under ideal conditions - summer solstice, during the brightest hours of the day. As we're located in Calgary (lat:51.050N), Canada, you may get slightly different results due to […]

August 31, 2001
Closed for the Holiday!

As the rest of North America will be closed Monday September 3rd, so will we. Business as usual on Tuesday!

June 2, 2009
Maker Faire, Nunchucky, PumLantern

WOW! What a week! Most of us have returned from Maker Faire, where we had a fantastic time. We met a lot of great people, saw loads of neat projects and displays, and got a chance to take in some beautiful California weather.  We're absolutely exhausted after an insanely long and busy weekend, but we're […]

March 20, 2010
Readin', Writin', & Instructablesin...

Well, it's been a few weeks since the last update. We have a few big projects on the burner - we're not quite ready to make any announcements yet, but keep your eyes open in the next few months. But don't fret - there are some things we can share with you this week. For […]

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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.

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