500+ Attributes / Looking for suggestions

[LilleyPadGifts]

I am looking for suggestions to make my new site more user friendly when it comes to a few of our custom items.
One product line consists of the customer "building" a bracelet, key chain, hair clip, ring, etc.... They choose the strap color they want, then choose the charms to be placed on it, in the order they want them placed. I am also in the middle of relaunching my new site with a new name and many other product lines, several which will follow along the same guidelines but different products. The old way, I added the charms as attributes to the products (straps).

My OLD site is :

http://www.spiritjewelry.org

Here is an example of how I used to handle this issue but we had less attributes to choose from then :

http://www.spiritjewelry.org/index.p...roducts_id=187

Right now, as you can see, the Charms (attributes) are name only in a drop list. We set how many can be added to, in this case, a bracelet strap, which to look nice we set to 7. I have someone who can set it up so that as you hover over the name the pic shows up, but we have over 500 charms to choose from now .... I had another idea where there are columns of charm pics and 7 blank boxes at the top. They click on a pic of the one they want and the pic shows in the first box, they choose what they want for the next charm and click on pic and it pops into second box... and so on. Might be a bit tricky for my web guy who is helping me with some custom features on my new site, but he says nothing is impossible ... why do I see dollar signs above his head when he says that .

So any suggestions would be appreciated.

[DrByte]

Your question reminded me of what I saw them do with the site in this post: https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread....eview-my-site)

[LilleyPadGifts]

Not sure I see the comparison lol

[DrByte]

I was referring to the custom display of the attribute selection form.
Clearly it's for a very different product, and image-hovers aren't as relevant in their case.

I like your idea of listing columns of charms to choose from, as it makes it very clear how to accomplish their goal.

[mc12345678]

With so many options and things to choose from will likely want to look into using ajax or similar to try to keep the session alive while they navigate/peruse the images. With so many available options, first time visitors especially will take longer than someone that has seen the items/options before.

[LilleyPadGifts]

I was referring to the custom display of the attribute selection form.
Clearly it's for a very different product, and image-hovers aren't as relevant in their case.

I like the idea of the drop boxes on the left, but since we have to have up to 7 charms per product, it wouldn't be any different then what I have set up now. Each drop box has to have the same 500+ charms in it too . There has to be a better way both for the speed of the load and the ease for the customer.