Looking For Ideas on Category Change

(Sorry for the length of this post, I just wanted to make sure it was clear.The site is l i n d a s d i e t d e l i t e s)

I am attempting to change my category layout and was wondering if anyone might have suggestions on either how to do what I think I want to do or maybe a better way of accomplishing my end goal. My end goal is ease of navigation without loss of SEO and without creating broken links due to changes.

My site started with a couple categories and has grown to many. With the use of the BetterCategories mod I was able to create the category box that I wanted. I have two major "groups" of categories with static headers dividing them in the category box, rather than Category>>subcategory. I'm about to add a third (expanding the gluten free section) and I think in terms of navigation it is about to become overwhelming. Users interested in the bottom categories have to scroll all the way down just to use them.

I didn't use subcategories originally because I wanted all categories to be visible at all times as it currently is on the site. I originally did this for SEO and navigation reasons.

So with the growth of categories it seems I need some way to condense the view of categories either through a category>subcategory structure or through something such as, click a link/option and then you can only see certain categories on the left rather than all of them.

My only hold up is that I am worried if I shift to a category>subcategory structure, it will result in broken links and a loss of SEO rankings since ZenCart will auto change the web address. So it seems like the simple switch to category>subcategory is not an option.

• lindasdd

If you go to a category/subcategory structure, you can use 301 redirects in an .htaccess file to point old category searches to the new locations. This should only cause a brief hiccup in search rankings, as the search engines will quickly find the new pages.

The newer versions of Categories Dressing incorporate various category/subcat display options, so you might benefit from upgrading it. You can also get the divider above each category with a single border-top: property in the stylesheet, instead of specifying one for every category (with any version of Cat Dressing).