Designing an admin panel with add/edit/delete products option
I am creating a custom admin backend for my website in Laravel.
I have several categories and sub categories of products that I would like to add/edit and delete in the backend.
I have around 10 categories now. Each category, in turn, contains a couple of subcategories. Products under one category/subcategory will have a completely different set of options/specifications than a product under a different category. So the form for adding a new product will be unique for each category/subcategory.
These are the 2 workflows that I have in mind :
Workflow 1
Admin Logs in
Clicks on Products tab on the left
Display list of products with add, edit, delete buttons on top.
On clicking Add New, a separate page will open which will have a drop down with a label 'Select Category'.
On selecting, let's say category A, a second drop-down will appear below the first with all the subcategories auto-populated.
On selecting a subcategory, a form will appear with options like Product name, Price, specifications etc.
Workflow 2
Admin logs in
Clicks on Products
Clicks Add new product
A separate page will open where the product categories are displayed.
On selecting a category, another page will open which will display all the subcategories.
On selecting a subcategory, a separate page with the form for adding a new product will be displayed.
Which of these workflows do you think would be more user-friendly? With the first workflow, with all the ajax stuff going on, I am worried whether it becomes confusing for the admin once the number of categories and products goes up in future and also whether the code will become complicated.