This past weekend (and early this week) I’ve been working on a small micro site for a client who needed something ready to go ASAP. In an effort to conserve time, we decided to go a CMS route so that the client could take care of all then content population. As we’ve done so many times in the past, WordPress was the application of choice.

Although this was not going to be used as a blog per say (no commenting on any of the pages or posts), the built-in features that come with WordPress meant that the customization would be kept to a minimum, so this seemed like the logical choice to use for this project.

The site was composed of six main pages, and in each of those pages there could be any number of second level sections. Creating a page for all of these, although possible, didn’t seem to be the best choice. Since WordPress is not a true CMS, there is no visible hierarchical structure, so figuring out what page is a child of who would be a bit of a nightmare.

In my opinion, the best solution was to create a page for each of the six main sections. Then, for each of these pages, create categories with the same name. Once that was complete, sub-categories would be created for any page that was going to have secondary navigation.

For example, using the sample sitemap below, the following structure was built:

Sample Site Map

  1. About Us
    1. Org. Chart
  2. Contact Us
  3. Our Company
    1. Goals
    2. Values
  4. Our Business
  5. News & Events
  6. Media
    1. Radio/TV
    2. Press Releases

Using the above site map, I created categories for:

  1. About Us
  2. Contact Us
  3. Our Company
  4. Our Business
  5. News & Events
  6. Media

Then, within About Us, Our Company and Media I created child categories where necessary (i.e. within Media I created two child categories of Radio/TV and Press Releases).

Now, all that remained was to customize my WordPress theme to display the content properly. This took a bit of working around, but I got it to a point where it works as expected and is really easy to customize if more pages are added to the site, or vice-versa. If interested, I’d be more than happy to do a posting on the code I used to accomplish this.