Limit Number Of Products w/Next Function

[Classix]

I know i posted a thread the other day, but i'm still having no luck even with the advanced guide. :confused:

What i'm trying to do is limit the number of product you inicailly see in the section, say there's 20 product in a section, i'm only wanting the first 6 or 9 to be show, but with a link in the top right hand side indicating how many pages there is with a next button to take you onto the next 6 or 9 products within the section.

Atm the moment the products all in one section, which take a long time to load on the net, so i thought if it just loaded the first 6 prodcts would reduce loading time within the section, but giving them the option to see the next 6 or 9 products. Can this be achieved and keep all the products in 1 section, or would i have to seperate every 6/9 products into sub sections ie. page 1, 2 , 3, 4 and so on.

Can anyone suggest the best way about tacking this problem.

Here's a link to a section which i like to happen too.

http://www.classixshop.com/acatalog/tuk-shoes.php

Cheers FrAz

[wjcampbe]

You need to seperate the products into pages.

[Duncan Rounding]

The best way to do this is to split your sections up into more manageable sizes.

Even by adding prev/next links I doubt you find many people bothering to page through more than a couple of pages.

Consider making a more compact section of cut down duplicates that click through to the product so more can be seen on one page. You could also reduce the size of the duplicate images and optomise them further to mimise the page load.

[Classix]

Hmm i c what you mean. Our pages used to use thumbnails 80x80px, but i found you couldn't see the product clearly enough to warrant actually seeing the product so i changed it to a bigger thumb 120x200,which looks alot better, but on the downfall takes my page room. I'll try restructuring it using a max on 4 pages with in the section n see how that looks, Cheers FrAz

[acompton]

Could you break them up into sub-sections of styles rather than list by brand?

I, too, wrestle with the thumnail size problem. I chose 75x75 for ease of loading, but some product images are almost meaningless at that size. You are selling a largely visual item, so keeping a large thumbnail is important.

[NormanRouxel]

I've done a patch "AutoProductImages" that replaces all product images with small icons. When you mousover any of these icons, the larger original product image is displayed. These full-size images are only loaded on demand so overall page load time is good. See http://www.drillpine.biz/v8autoproductimages/acatalog/Books.html for a demo.

<EDIT> Whoops. This patch is only available for V8.