navigation drop down menu's?

[gracefuli]

This is what i am trying to do:
on home page- left column lists catagories such as: women's, mens, children
when a customer selects women's - i want the next menu to drop down to select: blouses, pants, shoes, etc. customer clicks one of these and it taken to that product page.

1. does a specfic "theme" offer this funtionality?
2. if not, what work around can we use? and will it "annoy" bots?

thanks-
grace

[Jim]

There are two ways this can be done. If you have an older version of ShopSite when you assign a page to another page the links to that page will be placed in typically the left of the screen. It is possible to make a multi level navigation but that is not something that is done by ShopSite, at least not in most cases.
If you have a newer version of ShopSite there is a global navigation option under Preferences > Navigation. You can configure links that will display in the header, left, right, footer of the page. The top/header can have a number of levels deep. The Left, Right and bottom are limited to 2 levels so that would still work for what you are wanting. (I don't remember if this feature is just in Pro, or Pro and Manager. I'm pretty sure it isn't in Starter level stores. Most of the themes will use the navigation that you setup but some of the older ones like Rounded, Mondrian, Stain glass and others near the bottom of the list may not use any of the Navigation settings.

I don't know about the bots but they should be able to follow any of the links on a page. What they do with the info is another question you would need to ask the bot's developer.

[gracefuli]

but the left colmn- it has 2 levels- but they are listed, not drop down. so if i have 10 catagories, and 3-4 subcat's, it becomes a very long list. and difficult to tell cat from sub cat. what can be done here. thanks- grace

[Jim]

There are styles output by the code that displays the links. You can view the source of the html page and find which styles are used and create a style sheet that will display the items as a dropdown instead of having the links listed. I'm not a css expert so I can't tell you how to do it but a web search should turn up some code for making dropdown menus and you could adapt that to fit the style classes that are output..

[gracefuli]

thanks- need to process this. Anything in custom templates?