Add category counts to main pages? Not just side menu?

[mcqueeneycoins]

Is there an easy way to add category counts to the menus on the main content portion of my site, rather than just the site menus on the left? What's happening is my customers are navigating through the site using the category images, rather than the side menus. Then, they occasionally get to a category that does not currently have any products in it, which if the category counts could show, it would save a click. I don't want to turn the categories off, because I want people to know we carry those products, but that we just don't have any at the moment. That way they can always come back to check to see if we got any in.

As always, your help is greatly appreciated!

[dbltoe]

Nothing turns me off more than finding an item in Google and winding up on a site that says "Sorry, your search returned no results." This seems to be giving the same impression to the customer.
Wouldn't it be a more positive experience if you told them that the Super Widgets will be in soon and subscribe to our newsletter to be one of the first to know?

[mcqueeneycoins]

I understand what you're saying, but the products we stock aren't the same item over and over again, in most cases at least. In these categories, we might get several unique items in over the course of several months, and would not be restocked necessarily. That's why I'd like to keep the category active (so the customer knows we carry this particular type of product), but not disable it entirely. While the newsletter is a nice idea (we encourage this already), it doesn't accomplish 100% of what I'm trying to do.

[mcqueeneycoins]

Anyone else have any ideas on this one? I copied some code from the categories sidebox, and can get the prefix and suffix to appear, but not the counts. If someone could give me some direction I would greatly appreciate it. In the modules/category_row.php file, I edited the code to look like this:

    $list_box_contents[$row][$col] = array('params' => 'class="categoryListBoxContents"' . ' ' . 'style="width:' . $col_width . '%;"',
                                           'text' => '<a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_DEFAULT, $cPath_new) . '">' . zen_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . $categories->fields['categories_image'], $categories->fields['categories_name'], SUBCATEGORY_IMAGE_WIDTH, SUBCATEGORY_IMAGE_HEIGHT) . '<br />' . $categories->fields['categories_name'] . '</a>' . CATEGORIES_COUNT_PREFIX . $box_categories_array[$i]['count'] . CATEGORIES_COUNT_SUFFIX);

I know I need to change the middle piece in order to generate a count, or perhaps reference the sidebox file somewhere so it can pull the data, but to be honest I just don't know what the next step is.

Thanks!