Thoughts on use of categories in design

I'll describe what we did first, then explore some thoughts on how this might help your site.

We talked with our customers and friends about the ways in which they find our products.  Being a music oriented service retailing folk albums as downloads there was a clear structure:

1. albums belongs to artist

2. album belongs to style of music  (not artist, as they tend to move around genres).

But then we found it important to have categories that listed albums by:

3. month of addition  - so customers know easily what has been added, not just in 'new additions' as the history is lost from there.  If someone hasn't visited for a month or two, they can catch up easily using this.

4. Artist A-Z - this meant moving artist down as a sub-category and then each album as a product linked to artist.  Easy to do in ProductCart but gave us excellent feedback (especially when shown in a PC generated storemap).   So it goes Artist A - Z > Individual Artist > Album.

5. We also had suggestions as to 'I heard your music on a podcast but I don't know who it is' so we put up categories for that.

6. Plus where the music was from and the label it is on.

So our products are set within a number of categories artist (and artist A-Z), music style, country, podcast etc.  Within ProductCart this isn't as complex as it sounds and setting up one product with the right relationships, we just kept cloning it for subsequent products and doing tiny refinements as we went to the relationships.

This can be seen at http://www.wovenwheatwhispers.com.  I know its not directly relevant to your store but hopefully it gives a view of our experiences.

We have used the standard left hand category approach of PC as that fits with our design, but there's no limitation on having to do this.

Having taken a look at your store, it's clearly focussed on a wide ranging area with an informed customer base.  The front screen is perhaps overwhelming though and may get ever more complex.  The top level categories at the top are fine but swamped with other content.

The left and right hand category bars could easily be replaced with an expandable category list in Product cart.

So 'type of sport' and 'sports awards' would be top level categories (equivalent to my artist a-z) which then upon clicking show a dynamic category list of sub-categories (your 'individual sports' would be equivalent to my 'artist' breakdown).   The top level categories would go something like...

Sport   (subcategories, baseball, American football, etc)

Award Type   (rosette, cup etc)

Customer Type  (corporate, academic, retail etc)

with the products being associated with one or more of the subcategories in brackets.

I have this set to show the categories in the main window but ProductCart also supports' out of the box' this breaking down nicely beneath the category heading.  There are different ways to show this using the 'generate navigation' function in V3.

This would simplify the page, make it easier to view but still ensure your categories are only a click away.

Your structure would have individual products linked to multiple categories such as 'sports award', 'sport' (such as 'baseball').

You can then make room in the main page for more targeted featured items (like we have just done with the 'Tursa' label on the home page) and a selection of currently featured products.

I hope this is useful as a starter.  If I can be of more help, feel free to ask either on the forum or directly by email.

cheers

Mark

We have setup a few test categories and sub categories as you suggested and it looks like this is what we needed. Thanks for the helpful reply!

Wes