January 2009

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Now it's time to start laying out the store by adding categories. These will be the main groups of items you will have on your site and give people an idea of where to start clicking to find what they want. If you're running a Photography store then you'll most likely have categories like:

• Cameras
• Film
• Batteries
• Camera Bags
• Flashes
• Lenses

You can have as many categories as you want and by default they will list themselves alphabetically unless told to do otherwise and I'll address that shortly. There is also a setting you may or may not want to change that controls whether or not the categories are displayed in the header as links. If you have a lot of categories or just don't like the way it looks, don't worry, we can turn it off. Let's add a category first and look at some screenshots so you can see what's going on here. Start by going to:

CATALOG > CATEGORIES & PRODUCTS

Here you'll see the area we'll be working in, below are the instructions for adding your categories to the site, to add more then one category just complete the steps below.

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1. Category Name - Pretty self explanatory
2. Category Description - This is where you might want to add some information about the products that your customers can find in this category especially if the products in it are custom made or something exclusive to your site.
3. Category Image - Ignore this for the moment please.
4. Sort Order - Here is where you can change the order that categories display in. Ideally you should put increments of 5 in here. If you have a category named Alpha and one named Beta, but you want Beta to be on top of the list, you would enter 5 into the Sort Order box, then for Alpha you would enter 10 into the Sort Order box. Adding them with increments of 5 will also allow you room to add future categories below Beta but above Alpha. Click   and you'll be taken back to the main screen for the Categories & Products.
5. Go ahead and add your main categories now please.

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Now we're at the screen we started with, but now it looks different because it's now displaying the categories we've added. Here are some things to look at on this page now.

•   FOLDER - This little icon will allow you to enter into the category you created. Once inside of a category you will have the option to either start loading products or add additional sub-categories to further help define and separate the product categories on your site.

There's also a series of dots on this page to the right now and I will describe them here because you'll want to know what they do before you accidentally delete a whole category of products and email me screaming to fix it.

• GREEN DOT - This little dot control whether or not a category and the products under it are visible on the site to customers. If you click on it ( go ahead and try it out ) it will turn red , and if there are products in that category it will ask you if you want them deactivated as well.
• GREEN DOT with the white "e" - This little dot can be clicked if you want to go back and change the name of the category or correct a spelling error. It will bring up the same screen you had when you added the category the first time. You can also edit the sort order, description, and images ( yes I know, we'll get to that in a minute ).
• RED DOT with the white "x" - THIS IS A BAD BUTTON !!!! This button will delete a category and any products under it. If you are unsure whether or not there's products, look to the left a bit and see where it says 0 of 0 active, if it has numbers in there, you should check inside the category to see what's there and if you really want to delete it all.
• PURPLE DOT with the white "m" - This dot allows you to move categories around. Say you have Alpha and Beta as categories, this will allow you to move Beta INTO the Alpha Category and make a sub-category ( more on those in a minute also ).
• CHECKERBOARD DOT - This dot allows you to define the meta tags for the category. This is important for Search Engines as they will use the META information when listing pages of your site. Simply enter the keywords for the products that are in that category.

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On your site you should now have a category or two showing in the admin section where we're at, if not, make them now or I will flog you with a wet noodle !!!!

Keeping with the Photography shop idea, let's take our first category of Cameras. Now in our store we're going to have 35mm and Digital Cameras so we need to add those as subcategories inside the Cameras category.

Click on the little folder icon next to the category name, now you're pretty much in the same spot you started except you're actually in the Cameras category. Here is where you will add your 35mm and Digital Camera categories just like you did for the main categories. you'll also see the same buttons as mentioned above. You can repeat this process if you want to further break things down. So if you have 3 mega pixel Digital Cameras and 5 mega pixel Digital Cameras, you would click on the Digital Cameras category and go in and add those as subcategories. The same rules apply in regards to the sort order of the items, if you leave that blank they will list alphabetically or numerically.

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While you are adding your categories you had the option to add images. What these do is just make the categories look spiffy by allowing you add an image the represents that category. The best example I can give you of this is the image to the right taken from our site at http://www.gotcandywraps.com

Here you can see that each of the categories has a name and an image with it. The image shows you a representation of what's inside the category. This can be useful in marketing your products on your site because people are very visual and would much rather click on an image then a text link.

If you look at the second image, you will see that once inside one of the categories, the image set for the category becomes more like an icon in the upper left there.

Additionally, both of the images to the right show you what a category looks like with the description added and images together, kinda snazzy huh ????

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Now, we've got the site coming together, let's take a look at the front of it real quick.

What I want you to look at in the screenshot to the right is across the top there, the light grey links that say "TEST CATEGORY 1" etc...... right now those actually look fine, but imagine if I had 10 or more main categories. It would be just a mass of jumbled up words there. So now you have the option to do something about that by going to:

CONFIGURATION > LAYOUT SETTINGS > Categories-Tabs Menu ON/OFF

Here you can select whether to turn that bar off so that it doesn't show up on the site. I would suggest adding all your categories first and looking at it, then decide for yourself. The second screenshot shows you what it looks like with the tabs menu turned off. This is just one of the things we'll be working on later when we touch up the site to make it more presentable.

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