Collapsible Category Side box

On my web site I have thousands of products and a couple hundred categories that they all belong to, so when a section of the categories side box is uncollapsed it looks a little overwhelming :shocking: and in order to get to the next category you have to scroll all the way through the sub categories to get to it.

Does any one know of a module or a little bit of code that would improve it? Perhaps by adding a feature where if you click the top level category again it would collapse all of the sub categories such that only the top level categories are showing.

Here is my website www.readyholster.com
Also I am using the Categories Dressing Module for my side box.

Thanks for your help!

Probably a silly question, but are your customers really going to look for the brand name or would they be looking for a style and then a barrel length or other feature?

Having just checked out your website, I think that the special search feature is useful (where you find the necessary holster by the type of gun etc).

I'm assuming that you've changed it since Kim's reply, but regardless, it looks really good! I'd be happy using that, if I owned a gun (I'm in the UK, so no guns allowed!)

Holsters can be gun-manufacturer-specific, but it looks like the OP is selling more generic types. If you expand your selection, categorizing holsters by holster manufacturer would be useful, as many of us will only buy holsters from makers we've had good luck with.

I might be tempted to remove the Categories box altogether and let visitors use the (very nice) Find My Holster feature.

BTW, the site is very slow here this morning.

When we were laying out the format of the categories we considered several different options including not even having the side box. But in the end we decided it made the most sense, to us at least, and was easiest to implement by listing them so people picked a gun manufacturer and found their specific gun. Especially since many guns with the same barrel length will go in different sized holsters.

Thanks for the compliments of the Holster Finder. We put a lot of work into that and I am really pleased with how it turned out. It has been responsible for a large percentage of our sales so far and we are hoping that it will be the main way that people navigate our store. However we felt that for SEO purposes that we should keep the side box there. We weren't sure how well a search engine bot would be able to crawl through the Holster Finder.

So while we hope the Holster Finder is used for the most part, we still want the category side box around, and if it is going to be there then we want to make it as nice to use as possible. So if there was some sort of way to on-click hide the expanded category tree that appears on the top level category pages then I would really like to be able to implement that in to our category side box.

Moderator's note: Several posts have been removed for being off topic.