Wide selection of colors and fonts

[Sir Yendor]

Shopsite Pro v 10

I'm building a site for a company that sells monogramed items, towels, clothing, etc. In the Ordering Options, I have all the monogram thread colors and monogram fonts available via drop down menus. That's done and works perfect.

The challenge is that we want to display each of the color options and font styles so people can see what they are selecting before they make a decsion. There are over 30 color options and more than 20 font styles. To include each of these options graphicaly on every product page wouldn't allow the page to look the way we want it to. So instead, I've created a secondary page for displaying swatches for the font style and another page for the monogram color. These pages are not made within Shopsite currently but could be made there if neccesary. Each product/more info page has a link to both of these pages where customers can see all of the options.

The goal is to somehow allow customers to click on the image of their choice from each of these secondary pages and have it populate the drop down menu where the product options are displayed. Is this even possible? If not, do you have recomnedations for another direction?

Thanks

[ShopSite Lauren]

My first answer would be to usethe Advanced Ordering Options feature in ShopSite version 10 sp2 (and newer). This would allow you to have the image change based on the selection that the customer chooses from the ordering options (video below talks about this). However, because there are so many options, I understand why you may not want to do this option (gets WAY too many).
http://www.shopsite.com/tutorial/products-orderingoptions.htm

Do you have the same pull down menus (EXACT same options) for many products? If you do, the you could setup a custom product template specific for those products, so that when they go to a product page for one of those products, there would be radio buttons below each of the fonts and below each of the colors. You could hard code the template to display the options this way only if the options are the same for every product that is using this template. Then the customer would simply select the radio button below the color and font that they want, then add it to the cart, and those radio buttons would have the same name as the pull down menu, so it would populate the pull down menu correctly.