The system has two pages within it for the category browsing feature. The first is considered the category home page. That is the page that first appears when you go into any category's first page or home page. That is the page you see when you click on a category within ANY category navigation within the software. There is also the secondary page within the system. That is the page you will see when you click any pagination links once within a specific category. You will only see the pagination links if you have more listings within a category than you have set to display on one page within the admin tool.

This is done to allow more design control within the category browsing feature. Couple this with the category specific page template feature and you can have individual page templates for each category. Each category could have it's own home page template and it's own secondary page template.

These are the two admin tool locations to manage the page template attached to these two pages within the system:

DESIGN > PAGE ATTACHMENTS > 3 - Browse Categories
DESIGN > PAGE ATTACHMENTS > 3_secondary - Browse Categories 2nd page and higher

Within the default design installation each of those pages has a different page template attached to it. The former page has the following page template assigned:

/main_page/category_page.tpl

and the latter has the following page template assigned to it:

/main_page/basic_page.tpl

So by default only making changes in the former page template above affects the "first page" in each category. So if you wish to have both pages in the system to use the same page template make sure to make that change in the above admin tool pages.

These pages also have other subtemplates assigned within the body of that page that can also be set based on the browsing view currently selected. Look to these:

DESIGN > PAGE ATTACHMENTS > 3_grid - Browse Categories Grid Sub-Template
DESIGN > PAGE ATTACHMENTS > 3_list - Browse Categories List Sub-Template
DESIGN > PAGE ATTACHMENTS > 3_gallery - Browse Categories Gallery Sub-Template

For this part of that page look to the following configuration:

DESIGN > PAGE ATTACHMENTS > 3_featured_gallery - Browse Categories Featured Listing Gallery Sub-Template

And of course for all of the above you can set category specific templates for each of the ones mentioned above. For more on how to set those look to the support wiki page that describes the category specific templates feature here