Reformat Home/Index Page Brine Rally

Can anyone point me in the right direction for changing the layout of products on my homepage? My now estranged web designer set the style and just used summary blocks. This is no good for the website as I have lots of product pages and will be adding more (thousands of products to add). Summary blocks only allow products from one. What I need is rows across the screen of product from various product pages.I tried just using add Product. It is really hard to get them to sit side by side in a row and it destroy the other elements on the page, some of which need to be kept - all the content gets squashed to the side. I am not a web designer so figuring things out as I go.

How do you want it to look?

Hi @Paul2009

The site has got a lot of product pages and will ultimately have at least 100 due to the 200 product per page limit (I am aiming to have at least 20,000 items for sale in a few years).

The Home Page needs to be a quick view clickable summary of lots of different product but they need to be pulled from various pages - Summary Blocks are useless because they can only pull from one page.

Below the Blog section I want to put a row of recently added items - maybe 5 to 7 equally sized image links to products from across the site.

Then a row of DC comics pulled from various pages. Then a row of Marvel from various pages. Then a row of Graphic Novels from various pages etc. The stuff at the bottom of the page can stay.

I played around with it a lot last night but nothing worked. I tried added a whole new section and seeing if I could line up individual product adds - nope they just come all different sizes. Page design on Squarespace seems oddly complicated to me but maybe that is just because I don't understand it very well or maybe I am on the wrong template?

I guess it takes some time to get used to Squarespace collections, but the Brine template is the best one currently available on Squarespace 7.0. It's more flexible than any other. The issue you face is because of an overall limitation of Squarespace - product collections with a maximum of 200 items. Frankly, it will be a challenge to run a Squarespace store with 20,000 products, no matter what you do because the backend will be sluggish when you have so many products.

I would suggest moving to Shopify before you make any further investment. I know that's probably not what you want to hear, but I figure it's always best to be honest and upfront and give the benefit of experience. Shopify is much better at handling larger stores.

That said, it can be done, but to achieve what you've asked for above, you'll need the help of a developer. With additional code you can synchronise product collections into one 'super collection'.

Once the products are all together, you can then tag or categorise them to appear in the sections where you want them to appear using a modified Summary Block. For example, a featured section on the home page, a row of Marvel products, etc.

I hope that helps.

-Paul

Squarespace Expert & Professional Developer

Thanks, Paul. This is all the fault of my original developer who did not understand what she was doing and did not give me the right information. She has taken ££££ off me and then left me with this mess. She refused to accept any culpability and said Shopify would not be any better as they only allow 50 products per page. I am now many months after an embarrassing failed launch, because her original structure was useless, trying to sort the mess on my own and trying to get her to transfer the website over to me without taking her to court. As well as the money wasted on her, I have had the loss of income from no real outlet.

I totally appreciate your honestly and the information. I just cannot afford to start again or hire a new developer. I'll have to make things work here for now as best I can and try and get some sales going. Maybe in a year or two I can look for ways to improve things (or just get a real job ;) ).

At the moment I am trying out adding some grids at Squarespace's suggestion. Hopefully I can cobble something more functional together.

Thanks again,

Sumyra

In the meantime, you can easily move products between collections (assuming you haven't reached the limits) to enable you to feature some of them on the homepage. You can then use a standard (unmodified) Summary Block and some tags to select the ones to show. I hope that helps for the time being.

@Paul2009 Thanks. Actually, adding a Gallery Grid for each row needed and then the correct URL for each Image seems to have worked and is the best solution for this particular situation. A small victory!