Custom Category Page

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   I can't use the pages feature because it is kind of a weak tool and it will be difficult to manage many articles and posts, so I want to make a category called Find Answers with sub categories and "posts" which are just product pages that don't ship or have an add to cart button.

I have a page that I started called Find-Answers-C213.asp which is basically a copy of the view category page. What I want to do is customize this page so that it looks like this:

Category Title
Category Description

Sub-Category Icon            Sub-Category Icon             Sub-Category Icon
Sub-Category Icon            Sub-Category Icon             Sub-Category Icon

Single Column Table where you replace the description, sku, price columns with a single column of product titles (questions) with alternating table color to separate out the lines.

Question
Question
Question
Question
Question...

The cool thing about this is if this can be done, when they click on a question it will take them to the custom product page where you have:

Product Title
Short description              Image
Long Description
Cross Sell 1            Cross Sell 2                Cross Sell3

This way you can actually have links to the products that you are answering questions about and create sales.

Has anybody ever done anything like this before? If so, how much did it cost to do?

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ammonihah Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Groupie Joined: 18-April-2008 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 57	Post Options Post Reply Quote ammonihah Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Custom Category Page Posted: 23-October-2015 at 11:33am
	I can't use the pages feature because it is kind of a weak tool and it will be difficult to manage many articles and posts, so I want to make a category called Find Answers with sub categories and "posts" which are just product pages that don't ship or have an add to cart button. I have a page that I started called Find-Answers-C213.asp which is basically a copy of the view category page. What I want to do is customize this page so that it looks like this: Category Title Category Description Sub-Category Icon Sub-Category Icon Sub-Category Icon Sub-Category Icon Sub-Category Icon Sub-Category Icon Single Column Table where you replace the description, sku, price columns with a single column of product titles (questions) with alternating table color to separate out the lines. Question Question Question Question Question... The cool thing about this is if this can be done, when they click on a question it will take them to the custom product page where you have: Product Title Short description Image Long Description Cross Sell 1 Cross Sell 2 Cross Sell3 This way you can actually have links to the products that you are answering questions about and create sales. Has anybody ever done anything like this before? If so, how much did it cost to do?

dwatch Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 26-February-2006 Status: Offline Points: 33	Post Options Post Reply Quote dwatch Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 23-October-2015 at 2:45pm
	Interesting idea and everything makes sense. I kind of lost you on this part though. Single Column Table where you replace the description, sku, price columns with a single column of product titles (questions) with alternating table color to separate out the lines. Question Question Question Question Question... Also, what would the sub-categories be? Topics? I'm assuming each product would include the question and answer, so are you just saying above that you want to have the product (in this case questions) displayed withing the categories with the actual sub-categories?

ammonihah Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Groupie Joined: 18-April-2008 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 57	Post Options Post Reply Quote ammonihah Report Post Thanks(1) Quote Reply Posted: 26-October-2015 at 11:14am
	dwatch, All I am basically saying is that right now, the category page has a table with several columns. Those would go away and just be a single column with the title of each "product" that they can click on to go to the "product" detail page to read the answer to the question. The more I look at this, the more attractive it is becoming. I can serve as a blog or as a question and answer page and allows nail down, which Google seems to like. I actually wish that product cart would get rid of content pages and just implement something like this. I would make my life so much easier when it comes to customer service and social marketing as I would now have social media buttons on every question and answer page for people to share, just like they share a product.

Greg Dinger Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Certified ProductCart Developers Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238	Post Options Post Reply Quote Greg Dinger Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 27-October-2015 at 1:50pm
	This is a CMS page: http://www.cannonfuse.com/store/pc/Frequently-Asked-Questions-d31.htm It's just a page in "manage pages" using an accordion JS. Does that accomplish what you want?

ammonihah Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Groupie Joined: 18-April-2008 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 57	Post Options Post Reply Quote ammonihah Report Post Thanks(1) Quote Reply Posted: 27-October-2015 at 2:48pm
	If you only have 100 small pages it probably does. But it doesn't allow for more levels of nail down, it doesn't allow for automated share, like, pin buttons on the page, it doesn't allow me to put related products on the page using the existing related products cross sell features. The competitors I have that are excelling are doing a lot of quality content, cross selling on that content, and automating how their customers can easily share that content on various social media. I just don't think a javascript is anything more than an attempt to make an add on to the content pages feature already there, which is not very robust. Of course that is just my opinion and I'm sure others are using the content pages successfully. PS. Can you imagine manually adding several cross sell product links to 400 to 500 content pages and manually managing them when a product name changes or a product is discontinued? Whew. One of my competitors has over 2400 content pages that are each tailored to specific unique key words, most with at least 2-5 product cross sell links with pictures.

Greg Dinger Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Certified ProductCart Developers Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238	Post Options Post Reply Quote Greg Dinger Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 27-October-2015 at 4:16pm
	It was not clear from your OP that this would be a format for many pages. Your reference to Find-Answers-C213.asp made it sound like you needed to create a single FAQ page. With regard to your "can you imagine" question, have a look at this page: http://www.tastefulgarden.com/store/pc/Vegetable-Gardening-for-Beginners-d27.htm ALL of the product placement in the growing guide section of that site is dynamic. We engineered a mechanism that allows a set of hidden categories to be managed via the admin, and by using an IFRAME statement one declares which category (or categories) appear on such a page. Declare your categories, assign products, and as you change prices or descriptions or anything else, the changes will render dynamically to your content pages. Moving on to assigning large numbers of cross sell relationships, I do hope you are aware of this: https://www.greybearddesign.com/productcart/cross-sell-wizard/

dwatch Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 26-February-2006 Status: Offline Points: 33	Post Options Post Reply Quote dwatch Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 28-October-2015 at 5:44pm
	make sense now.