$10

Category descriptions split by category content

I'm working on a website - blah blah.

The category pages have image thumbnails for each post inside - and now I need to add content to the category pages. The way it has been designed is to have an introduction paragraph above the thumbnails, then the thumbnails which link to each post, and then more text underneath.

However, there are a lot of categories, so setting up a category template for each category is a lot of work, and not very future-proof. What would be ideal is if custom fields could somehow be added to the categories, or something like that.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how I could achieve this?

Thanks.