Date: 03/13/06 (Web Development)    Keywords: ecommerce, css, asp

There's this ecommerce site I created a while ago and all the item thumbnails nicely flow on the page thanks to CSS. The number of items in each row is not fixed and flows to the width of the user's screen. In my opinion this makes very efficient use of screen real estate and therefore maximizes the number of items someone can see at one time.
A different site than the one in question, but I used the same technique.
Well lately on two other sites two people who are basically computer illiterate fail to appreciate the elegance of this solution.
A-The number of items much be the same on each row.
Sorry that is unreasonable and only possible if that category has an even number of items. The say that they understand and then when an item is added or removed from the store there an "emergency". This person calls the IT guy at 6 on Friday to say that there's a major problem with the ____ site that the last row only has one item! I have tried to help explain this and they just don't want to accept the fact that they just don't grasp how this sort of thing should work.
B-If a category only has two items then they must have larger thumbnails or centered, they look too "lonely".
I really just plain don't know how or why to solve this "problem" except that there shouldn't be a separate category for just two items. The company won this award and they have two special items to promote this and they insist on these items having their own special category. My point is that categories should be created with the intent of allowing the users to find items easily, not so much as a marketing tool. The one item is already a large image featured on the home page, so it is unlikely that the site's visitors will miss that item.
I usually am pretty good at simplifying explanations for things like this, but I am just stumped on a definitive reasoning behind why I have done things the way I've done them—the correct way as I see it.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/webdev/305983.html