[osCmax V2.0.25] top navigation menu and left side category customization question

[MrE03]

I have a navigation menu that's across horizontally near the top of my website at the moment, and I wanted to change those to categories (i.e. - shirts/pants/hats), and on the left side instead of showing categories display subcategories (teen/adult/caps/beanies) when a customer clicks on specific categories on the top navigation menu.

Does anyone know of a contribution for this or is it difficult to code?

[pgmarshall]

I have not seen a mod for this but it has been asked before ... so you basically want the top level in the horizontal menu and then the categories only displays the children to this top category when it is active.

Doable - Yes. Seen the code to cut and paste - No.

If you google around (this forum and google) I do remember seeing a bit of code in a e-book explaining how to get a different categories box per top level category ... then all you would need to do is to wrap it in a conditional to show/hide depending on the parent category ...

Regards,

[Amugin]

I do remember seeing a bit of code in a e-book explaining how to get a different categories box per top level category ... then all you would need to do is to wrap it in a conditional to show/hide depending on the parent category ...

I think it's described in "Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook" In chapter 2 you find this example:

"By adding a navigation bar with your top categories at the top of the pages, the category box only needs to be visible if there are subcategories to a category. At all other times, the category box will be hidden to free up the space."

[ridexbuilder]

Not that I'm a Sales & Marketing guru; this may be counter productive in the context of, why hide products that the customer may not realise that they want? (That sounds better to say, than read ). Put another way: the customer finds one of your products through a web search and happens to notice something else of interest.

[MrE03]

true, I'm still debating whether to go this route. However would trying to implement this code require a lot of coding from scratch? and I know this may be a little hard to answer, but would something like this be difficult to create? I'd say from a scale of 1-10, how difficult would something like this be?

[met00]

In a way I'm going to add to what Ridex has said. One of the strongest sales and marketing tools in the UI for customers is one that YOU actually don't tweak. "Customers who bought this also bought". This gets richer with every purchase and as it does it creates cross links that YOU (the shop owner) may have never considered.

Through featured products, specials, cross-sell, etc. osCmax has a bevy of tools that allow you to present sales opportunities (up sells) to customers. But there is no equivalent to "walking around your store" other than a category list. Yes,when you have 50 cats and then some of them have 10-20 sub-cats, this can be seen as "messy" or TMI (too much information), but in reality, anything you can do to keep a potential customer on the site and interested in looking around is a good thing.

Just my $0.02

[i3r4dl4d]

Its actually a really good idea to sperate the site out and make it easier to navigate. Both these sites do exactly what you are asking. I'm trying to find a way to do it using oscmax but i'm struggling.

Yankee Candles UK & Yankee Candle Accessories UK I Buy Yankee Candles & Willow Tree Online
Women's Lingerie from the UK's Best Independent Lingerie Brand La Senza

[ridexbuilder]

The simplest solution (IMO):
This is a key reason for retaining the default 'catalog' (or whatever you want to call it) subdirectory structure and NOT installing it into the 'root' of your domain. [I consider it a bad move anyway]
The shop 'index.html' provides the main entrance point, with the glossy front-end and no side boxes shown (as per the examples above). Then, when one of the top menu items or flashy pic is clicked, the potential customer is presented with the 'standard' store.
It doesn't present exactly the same solution but is close, for little effort.

EJ