How can I make the attributes look like this?

I have been struggling with a problem since I started my zen cart almost a year ago. I actually came up with 2 solutions to this problem, and half my site is one way and the other half is the other. Because of this I have lots of duplicate titles and duplicate descriptions on my site and a product line that should be less than 100 items is about 3400 items..... Here is my situation, I sell a product that really has conditional attributes. Basically my products have a choice of 5 different coverings all available in their own set of colors.... So for an example product A is available in Grade A,B,C,D,E,or F. A may have 7 different colors to choose from, where as B may have 20, each product also get any one of 7 finishes as well. So what what I did originally is I made Product A a top level category, I then made each grade a sub category and the actual color the product with the finish as an attribute... (I hope you guys follow this). This basically makes 1 product into about 100 of basically the same product just different colors.... Here is an example http://www.stressless-furniture-store.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=33

The other solution I cam up with about half way through loading products was to keep the product as the top level category but make the grades the product and the colors based on grade as the attributes with a finish attribute.

Here is an example of this http://www.stressless-furniture-store.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=54

In both ways I end up getting some duplicate content with descriptions and meta tags, not to mention maintaining so many products takes a lot of time and effort and during the day I have many other duties. I think from a management and seo stand point It would be much easier for me if I could get all these condition attributes onto one product......

I was wondering if anyone can think of a better way of developing my category /product structure? and to maybe get my attributes to look like the screen shots I attached. We are now working on making a new site, one to include more products and a lot of the stuff we sell would have the same problems....

It's going to take some custom coding. It sounds like the benefits to your site's usability and maintainability are great enough to justify hiring someone to set it up if you don't have the skills yourself. I think a single well-thought-out sequence would be adaptable to all of your products.

gjh42:

It's going to take some custom coding. It sounds like the benefits to your site's usability and maintainability are great enough to justify hiring someone to set it up if you don't have the skills yourself. I think a single well-thought-out sequence would be adaptable to all of your products.

Paying someone is not out of the question!! I have some skills but I am a nub, but trying to learn so I can do it all myself... I guess what I am having the most trouble with is what would a single well thought out sequence entail? Should I look and see if I can accomplish this using Java Script? It is also very important to me to be able to upgrade the site fairly easily, since I try to update it every time a new patch comes out.

You would most likely need javascript to do this seamlessly. It would be preferable if you could have a workaround for those without js, even if it is more clumsy, but that might not be possible. Using the template override system correctly, you would not have to modify many existing files and most if not all of those would be in custom template folders. It is unlikely that a minor update would affect even one or two files in your mod, and merging should not be a big deal.

Visualize the ideal sequence of product choices, and that will tell you what dependencies you need to create. Note whether some choices are dependent on any others or not; those can go anywhere in the attribute flow.