Lots of items in a category

How to spread things out over multiple pages?

[RedWolf]

On my website I have my jewelry designs broken down into categories such as pendants, rings, etc and some of these into sub categoies by theme. These are one of a kind pieces and can't be sold without listing each one. My problem is that I am still comming to the point where I have 15 to 20 items in each category even when they are at this lower level and even with 3k thumbnails, I still end up with 80k or so page weights.

So I am left with the poor option of leaving things as is, or breaking the categories out some more. What are peoples feelings on number of items per page, methods of linking pages etc? I have seen a lot of placces use the page1 page2, pageX text links to do this, but I am concerned that the later pages would hardly ever get looked at. I also thought of breaking the pages out by price range since I have pieces that range from $20 to $400 in the catagories.

Any help with this would be appericiated.

[Easy_Coder]

offer paging with sorting ability so your users could sort by price, sku, desc, qty etc.... and add in filters that allow your users to narrow the results.