Good evening, Zenners. I need some general advice on how my site should be set up. My questions spread across many potential forums, so I figured this would be the best place for general Zen Cart theory advice instead of posting multiple separate specific threads all over the place.

My problem is this: I'm setting up a store for a client's online shoe/accessory business. What they want is two "mini-sites" within Zen Cart, a women's home storefront and a men's home storefront. For the purposes of this post, I'll focus on the women's home storefront because the men's home will be a carbon copy once I finalize it.

From the women's home, the client wants the customer to be presented with a general "Women's" graphic in the center wrapper, and a list of designers/accessories on the left column.

For example, the category layout would be:
Women's Home
|_Designer1 Shoes
|_Designer1 Accessories
|_Designer2 Shoes
|_Designer2 Accessories
...and so on.

This is where I get stuck and need advice. The client wants the customer to click on "Designer1 Shoes" and then be presented with different sizes to choose from.

For example:
Designer1 Shoes
|_Size 5
|_Size 7
|_Size 9

...or if they want Accessories...

Designer1 Accessories
|_Wallets
|_Handbags

That's going to be a hell of a lot of categories if I have to put sizes in subcategories for each designer (there are dozens of designers). And the way my client's business is set up, he's not always going to have Size 5 of Designer1's Shoes in stock. That leaves the potential of having many, many subcategories with 0 product in them at any given time. That wouldn't be necessarily a huge deal if I could somehow prevent categories with 0 product from being shown.

What is the best way to set this up in Zen Cart?

My questions are this:

1) Is there a way to have Designer1 Shoes bring up all available sizes (in a way the customer can narrow it down, ie. click Size 5 to bring up all Size 5 shoes) for that designer without having hundreds of subcategories?

I'm thinking there may be a way to do this with Options/Attributes, but it seems I would need an SQL query to bring up results to filter that designer and size combination. Furthermore, it would also seem I would have to hardcode (using blank sidebox or ezpage) a clickable list of links for each Designer/Size combination, which isn't much better than having the hundreds of categories. What if there are no Size 5's for Designer 1? I'd not want that as an option to choose which is not feasible if it's all hardcoded.

2) Without messing around too much with Product Types, is there a streamlined way to use the existing Categories box (or clone of it?) to separate the women's home storefront and men's home storefront? For example, I don't want to see the Men's Home Storefront or any of it's subcategories if I'm in Women's.

The existing Categories box will show both by default. Product Type seems very difficult to set up and too much trouble. A blank sidebox or ezpage would require hardcoding that, while doable, seems like an unnecessary amount of work to keep up on.

.........

Considering the type of business (one which will not necessarily have a certain Designer/Size in stock at any given time), is there a good way to set Zen Cart up to streamline this as much as possible? To basically only list categories with product available in them, or do it using options/attributes? Splitting the navigation up between men's and women's is the other big thing.

Any suggestions or comments regarding how something like this should be set up are most welcome. I'd prefer not to post a link to the store, but I wouldn't be opposed to PMing it to you if seeing it first would help you come up with an idea on how to best design this.

Thanks for reading!