Online catalog design

[DylanW]

We rearranged some pages today, which got me thinking of this. We have several categories of products on our ecommerce website, and a few of these categories have up to several hundred items each, and these categories are broken up into several different pages (think a "Widgets: Blue Widgets: page 1" sort of hierarchy).

Now, recently, we've been designing pages so that we have more items on each page, thus cutting down on the number of pages (since there's a significant number of visitors that don't go on to page 2, page 3, page 4, etc.)

Then again, when you're looking at 50 product thumbnails per page, it can take quite a while to download the entire page, so it's entirely likely that more visitors see more pages overall, but perhaps not all the items on each page.

Is this the best way to do it? Is there a happy medium between number of pages and number of items on each page?

[cyanide]

Hi Dylan,

Is this the best way to do it? Is there a happy medium between number of pages and number of items on each page?

I think overall it's better to have more pages than it is to have huge, long pages.

BTW
It's always helpful to post the URL
Is this it ? www.shavonne.com

Also helps to know the exact page you are talking about. It's always good to have a visual and Many people (myself included) don't have the time navigate 100's of pages to find the problem you are referring to.

I went through the site, but couldn't find page 2, page 3, page 4, etc.)

[DylanW]

Yes, the site is shavonne.com, the specific sections being http://www.shavonne.com/rings/sterling-silver.html and http://www.shavonne.com/rings/ring1.html.

I thought about posting a URL, but I didn't because this isn't so much a problem as it is just wanting opinions on good design practices.

[cyanide]

Hi Dylan,

Thanks for posting the links. It does help.

You certainly have a dilemma.
On most of your pages I had to scroll 3 times on a wheel mouse. I would suggest keeping it to 1.
So I think increasing the length of your pages would not be such a great idea.

On most pages there seems to be alot of 'white space'. Maybe tightening the pages up a little. The pixel width is 600. You could increase to 760 or 780 or even percentage (95% or 100%). That would give you more space width-wise and push everything up.

Any chance you could optimize your pictures a little?
On the first link, I timed it at 40 seconds to load on 56k dialup, which is pretty long.

Regarding number of pages, can you take those categories and break them down to sub-categories? That may be your best bet.

[DylanW]

On most pages there seems to be alot of 'white space'. Maybe tightening the pages up a little. The pixel width is 600. You could increase to 760 or 780 or even percentage (95% or 100%). That would give you more space width-wise and push everything up.

Eventually I'll probably go percentage.

Any chance you could optimize your pictures a little?
On the first link, I timed it at 40 seconds to load on 56k dialup, which is pretty long.

I confess I don't know much about optimizing pictures. I'm using Photoshop, and the settings I'm using are JPEG, Quality 40, and Optimized. At 100x100, the thumbnails tend to end up being between 1K to 3K.

Regarding number of pages, can you take those categories and break them down to sub-categories?

Probably not. The idea behind general categories is that most people shopping for jewelry browse rather than search for something extremely specific.